


What I Do When I Have Writer's Block

by hrwinter



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Tennis, Crow au, F/F, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Kasnian Kara - Freeform, Nuclear Winter, Soulmate AU, Tennis AU, You heard me, anesthesia au, coffee shop AU, drunk clubbing, fake dating au, gay halloween, hair porn fic, kara eating lots of food au, lena's a crow, milf kara, nuclear winter special au, that's my wife!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 35,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23911912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrwinter/pseuds/hrwinter
Summary: a place to upload my tumblr prompts and posts. short and sweet. every kind of AU. i'll update when i remember.2/17/2021 drunk lena + tennis au ch3 + big kara
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 687
Kudos: 1666





	1. the bicep obsessed tennis AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: How about one where Kara turning the tables by flexing her biceps/showing off her back muscles and abs

Lena’s never cared much for tennis. Her family owns some billion dollar thing-or-other, but she hasn’t ever actually made a public appearance or attended a match. Despite her last name being inked on every bright yellow ball, a classic, universally recognizable ‘L,’ Lena’s historically been more invested in completing her engineering PhD. And decidedly less interested in sunlight and hand eye coordination. She does just fine pouring a martini, thank you.

“Lena, you simply must come,” her brother begs one sunny afternoon. They’re lounging poolside at their vacation home for spring break.

“It’s the semi-final of the National City Open. We’re invited to sit in Sara Lance’s box seats, and she’s playing a local.”

Lena shoots her brother a sidelong, maligned glaze. She lifts her scientific journal back up.

“Remind me why we’re sitting in the Swede’s box? Isn’t that a touch anti-American?”

Lex leans across his pool chaise, and Lena blocks his appealing face by turning the page.

“I’ll get you all the RumChata champagne you want. There’s a whole tent.”

Lena’s magazine stays up. She reads the same sentence 8 times.

“Fine, bottle service, a whole booth,” he raises.

Lena hates it when Lex gets this way, she can never say no.

She looks up. “It’s not far from here?”

“Twenty minutes,” he endears, eyes rounded and hopeful.

Lena groans, shutting her journal.

* * *

The jubilant air of anticipation before the match is more exciting than Lena will ever admit, dead or alive. The massive stadium is filled with a chatter of all stages of inebriation, both quiet and loud. Lance has three other celebrities in her box (she’s a _popular_ player) and even Lena knows who two of them are, which is impressive given the “hobbit cave” Lena lives in at MIT.

“Seriously, I worry about your vitamin-D levels,” Lex mocks, but Lex doesn’t know dick-all about Vitamin D, or any vitamin for that matter. His primary study at Yale was pretty girls.

Currently, her brother is sucking down a strawberry laden glass of Moet & Chandon at the speed of light while charming the Princess of Morocco or whoever.

Lena rolls her eyes, glancing back to the court, adjusting her blocky sunglasses. She’s reaching the first stages of uncomfortably warm, the slight flop sweat forming at her brow under her wide brimmed sun hat most unwelcome. If she gets a sun burn, she’s going to flay Lex alive.

Maybe wearing all black was a mistake.

“Are we going to a wake?” he’d asked before they left. “Are you trying to suck all the light out of the desert?”

If only.

Down on the court, the players do a coin toss and begin to warm up. Lena hasn’t really taken a proper look at Lance’s opponent. It’s another crisply tan, All-American looking blonde. Lena dismisses her as fairly run-of-the-mill until she notices that the player is taller than Lance, taller even than she looked in the match guide. Six feet, maybe? She’s perfectly toned, too. Well-muscled. An honest to god Amazon.

Those arms, Lena thinks, they’re bulky. She can see the line of muscle across her shoulders ripple as she takes her ground strokes. She hits so hard, the ball strikes the strings in a whip crack, and there’s an answering flush in Lena’s body that has nothing to do with the sun.

She misses her drink straw entirely when she goes to take a sip, mouthing at thin air.

“Distracted, are we?”

Lena nearly jumps as her brother presses his face conspiratorially to hers.

“Shut up,” she replies in her imitation best of cool reserve, not taking her eyes off the other player.

She doesn’t need to see the smirk on his face to know it’s there.

Feeling suddenly and infinitely more invested, Lena does some quick research on her phone. How is the game played? How do you win? What’s this player’s name?

Kara Danvers. 22. Up and coming. Won junior Wimbledon. Single.

The only thing more impressive than her serve, apparently, is her thousand watt smile. Her teeth are the blinding white of a tooth paste commercial model.

When the match starts, Lena can’t tear her eyes away. She sits in a monk-like silence. A meditation on the beauty of movement, if you will. Kara breaks Lance’s serve, takes an early lead. She’s about to close out the set.

Lena’s learning all kinds of jargon. Who knew tennis could be interesting?

At the changeover, Lena stows her sunglasses and makes Lex go get more alcohol, preferably a vat of vodka brewed in a bucket of ice. When he’s gone, she notices Kara standing rather than sitting at her bench. She’s facing Lance’s box, too, instead of her own, and her eyes connect with Lena’s. Even at the short distance, Lena can see the baby blue of her irises, clear as the desert sky. She’s soaked in sweat, downright _glistening_ , and Lena watches her throat bob as she drinks from a water bottle. Kara plants one hand on her hip, and Lena swears she flexes her bicep. Lena’s traitorous eyes track the movement, and when Kara drops the bottle, she has the absolute nerve to smile.

Lena finds herself clapping for the wrong player not two games later.

“At least, try to give the barest impression you’re cheering for Lance,” Lex chides in a whisper. “Or we’re never getting invited back again.”

Lena doesn’t care.

In the next round, Kara does something similarly soul destroying at the baseline. While waiting on a challenged call, she glances at Lena and pulls her shirt up to wipe her face, not breaking eye contact. It grants full view of what are positively _mystical_ abs. Her obliques. Words for other anatomy that are entirely forgotten.

Lena’s brain goes into an early dementia. Lex belts out a full on laugh.

Lena becomes extremely intoxicated during the next forty-five minutes, in more ways than one, while Kara Danvers makes short work of Lance. During the post win, on court interview, she’s humble and appreciative, though honestly it’s a miracle that Lena can hear anything at all through the haze of her seismic attraction and the absolute roar of the crowd.

They clamber over each other in a craze to get at the signed balls Kara launches into the stadium. For the last ball, however, she aims directly for Lena in Lance’s box.

It has to be a massive social faux pas to do this in Lance’s box, but that doesn’t stop Lena from reaching out, anyway. She surprises even herself by snatching the ball out of the air with one out-stretched hand. She hasn’t caught a ball since second grade.

She turns it over in her palm to find a phone number and a quickly sharpied heart.

_Fuck_.

“God, I hope this makes the match highlights,” Lex looks down at the ball with glee. “Mother is going to _kill_ us.”


	2. the bicep obsessed tennis AU ch 2

Lena sits in a stunned silence for the majority of the drive back, the tennis ball still clutched in her hand like a vice-grip.

“Best hide that,” Lex suggests, tipping his sunglasses down as they pull into the drive. “Mother will roast it like a kebab over an open fire when she sees it.”

It’s sage advice, and Lena stuffs the ball between the squeaking red leather of Lex’s fancy passenger seat and the center console. They march back into their Palm Springs paradise home, Lex sprawling himself across the 10-piece sectional once they’re inside. Somehow he manages to take up three full seats.

“She probably hasn’t seen anything yet… right?” Lena asks perilously, sitting stiffly next to him.

Lena’s sure the goings on of a second tier tennis tournament and a reclusive heiress won’t make the national paper, but thanks to her party boy brother, it’s possible anything _Luthor_ will be in season. He’s more popular than the prince of England at this point.

“Oh, I’m afraid that cat is thoroughly out of the bag by now, sis,” Lex derides, and Lena grumbles, staring forlornly up at the ceiling.

The cold air of the house, however, is heaven sent, and she drapes her arm over the back of the couch like a swooned Victorian. Lex had insisted that they ride with the top down, and Lena unleashes her hair from its scarf, whipping the thing to the floor. She tries not to think about the press photos where she’ll resemble a scandalized, 1950s celebrity.

“The clip of you catching that ball has made it half way around the globe by now.”

“It’s been an hour,” Lena huffs under her breath, reaching for a drink that hasn’t been made yet.

Damn.

“On it,” Lex smiles, jumping up to the wet bar. By the time he’s handed Lena a scotch, however, their mother has whirled in through the front door.

Lillian chucks her keys onto the glass coffee table with a great clatter, causing the pair of them to startle. She turns a stainless steel glower on Lena.

“There’s nothing I enjoy more,” she starts, her bottle green eyes a skewer. “Than finishing a massage only to have my masseuse relay the message to me that my daughter’s acting like some kind of jerkwater Jezebel on the international stage.”

Lena sours. Having studied math and science for so many years, she’s starting to think she may need a thesaurus to interpret her mother’s insults. Jerkwater can’t be a word (is it a place?), and Jezebel might be some kind of biblical reference for slutty. Either way, it’s a tad religious for Lena’s tastes, but she’s willing to commend Lillian for the use of alliteration. She always wins at Scrabble.

“You should be proud of her, mother,” Lex pipes in with an easy smile and a save. “I’ve never actually seen her successfully flirt before. She may prove to make a fine wife yet.”

Lena unceremoniously punches him in the arm.

“Ow!” he yelps, spilling a patch of brown scotch onto his tan blazer and lap.

But Lillian’s not done.

“Couldn’t you have _at least_ crudely ogled a Luthor-sponsored athlete?”

“Do we really need the publicity?” Lena mutters back, still reveling proudly in the mess she caused Lex to make as he dabs a white napkin at his pants.

“Kara Danvers is under CatCo,” Lillian snipes, pointing an admonitory finger at Lena. “And you know how I feel about Cat Grant.”

“Well, Kara Danvers won the National City Open, so that seems like a mistake in hindsight, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t remind me of the three people I’ve already fired for it.”

Lena frowns.

“And I will not be joining the two of you for supper,” Lillian announces, climbing the stairs with loud, echoing slams of her heels. “I’ve lost my appetite.”

Her swift exit is punctuated by a door slam from further down the upper hall.

Lex leans forward mischievously, eye brows raised.

“No,” Lena forestalls him. She doesn’t even want to know what he’s going to propose next. She’s in enough trouble as it is.

“She’s already mad, she already knows,” he holds open his hands, pious. He looks stupid in a wet shirt and pants. “Let’s go to the Ball.”

“No.”

“Kara Danvers will be there.”

* * *

In a day that’s starting to feel like an all-nighter before a midterm, there’s squabbling over what Lena should wear to the party.

“I can’t wear this,” she snarks at Lex, pulling at the fabric of her outfit. “I’ve sweat a half of fifth of vodka through it.”

“Well here, try this one instead,” he passes her a black skimpy dress from the back of his closet.

“Where did you even get this?” Lena holds it up to the light. She’ll be lucky if it covers her ass. “It smells like a baby prostitute.”

He shrugs, smiling and smug.

“Well, it _has_ been laundered, isn’t that all that matters?”

Lena doesn’t want to ruminate too deeply on whatever waifish, nouveau socialite the dress had likely been stripped off of, but there aren’t really a lot of options. Although her mother had trained her since birth to always pack a cocktail dress, not in a million years did she ever think she’d be attending a tennis champion’s gala on this trip. Her discipline had slipped. The disappointments would just keep rolling in for Lillian.

At least, it’s black. Thank god for small favors.

By the time they arrive at the Ball, they’re fashionably late enough that they miss most of the press photos with the athletes posing with their respective trophies. The party is in full swing, bright lights flashing outside as they step out of Lex’s sports car. Lex waves, an old hand, while Lena simply glares at the photographers.

Inside, Lena expects something a bit more glitzy, like an oversized adult prom, but it’s more understated than that. There’s a crowd milling near the open bars, dressed elegant, diamonds and other high end jewelry glistening. Plus, with all the professional athletes in attendance, there’s muscles for miles, muscles as far as the eye can see. The DJ is fun, too, and the dance floor is a moving mass.

It makes Lena glad she cup chugged two coffees and a half bottle of B vitamin supplements before they left. She needs to be on her A game. She’s not an amateur.

She cranes her head, looking around.

“It’s nice to see you infatuated with someone new,” Lex comments, pushing their shoulders together. “What was the name of your last ex? Andrea?”

“Please don’t bring her up unless you’re prepared for me to get so black out drunk I beg to text her.”

“Comment rescinded,” Lex lifts an eyebrow, and they make their way to the bar.

After, they spend a good fifteen minutes schmoozing with L-Corp executives, sponsors, and manufacturer’s reps. The kind of thing Lena hates. Their mother is somehow already in attendance, and she gravitates close enough to Lena to whisper in her ear.

“Where did you get that dress? The red light district?”

“Almost,” Lena smirks. “Try your son’s closet.”

Lillian withers and walks away.

After, one of the suits refers to Lena as ‘Little Luthor,’ and she almost slaps the drink out of his hand. Lex takes the edge off with some story about getting lost at sea in Fiji, but all in all, she could die from the boredom. It’s when she’s looking away, formulating a desperate bid for freedom, when her sweeping gaze finds its mark.

Collar-bones. Biceps. A rippling hide of back muscles.

Kara Danvers is smiling and shaking hands with another player not fifteen feet away. Lena can see her forearm flex as she enthusiastically gestures towards the dance floor. It’s mesmerizing. The overhead light is kind to her, too, bouncing golden off her springy curls. The non-stop fantasy that had been playing in Lena’s head during the match had not thought to incorporate Kara with hair down, make-up, and a green, strappy dress. It looks silky and soft, the kind of material you luxuriate in running your hand over.

It’s a revelation.

And it’s not fair. Since when is Lena’s type so transparently a jock?

“Ms. Luthor,” the object of her fixation suddenly appears before her.

Did she black out?

“Ms. Danvers,” Lena incants her head back. Lex is suddenly gone, the charlatan. At least he took the three apes with him.

Lena returns her gaze to sparkling eyes, crinkled at the corner. They blaze an intent Butane blue, and Lena flushes under the heat of it. Kara burns all the carbon right away.

Oh no, she’s getting science horny, _fuck_.

“So, you know who I am, then,” Lena adds to mask her ever present and incriminating blush.

“I didn’t,” Kara’s quick to correct. “Not really. Not until after the match.”

She lingers there, a little awkward. It’s funny, up close and personal, Lena can sense that Kara’s eager. Excited like a golden retriever puppy finally getting to play. There’s a scowling redhead behind her that Lena deftly ignores. Instead, she focuses on Kara’s fidgeting fingers (long, big), alive with energy. Lena crushes a desire to reach out and tamp that energy down (preferably through one long, smoothing stroke of her bicep.)

“Nice to meet you,” Lena says before walking away.

Her brother wasn’t wrong about her ability to flirt.

“Wait,” Kara’s hand is suddenly warm hand at her elbow, fingers pinching firm. Lena pauses.

“Want to dance?”

“Now, you’re really asking for a gossip blind item.”

“Too late for that, don’t you think?” she smiles, pearly white.

Lena hates that she’s charmed.

“Fine.”

Kara’s hand winds down to Lena’s palm, twining there, a trap well laid and snapped close. She drags Lena to the dance floor, literally, because Lena refuses to fully lift her feet. When there, Kara wraps her arms around Lena’s waist, and Lena finds her fingers digging greedy into the muscles of Kara’s shoulder. She feels like she’s gotten at least one thing she wanted tonight.

They sway, Kara tall and towering despite the added inches of Lena’s heels.

“How come I’ve never seen you before today?”

“Tennis isn’t really my scene,” Lena looks around. There’s a dozen toned, sun bronzed, sweaty men and women flailing about. She doesn’t fail to notice Kara’s stark white ankle tan.

“What is your scene?”

“I’m finishing my PhD at MIT.”

“Smart.”

“If you mean ‘not a meathead,’ then yes.”

Kara feigns offense, balking and squeezing Lena at the hips. Lena fights another blush from creeping up her neck.

“A meathead? Is that what you think of tennis players?”

“If the tennis shoe fits.”

“I’ll have you know that tennis has the highest number of MENSA members.”

“What’s 564 x 29?” Lena asks, rapid fire.

“Uh.”

Lena drops her hands from Kara’s shoulders and pretends to be too insulted to continue dancing.

Kara only laughs, loud and bright, and guides their bodies back together. Somehow, they’re even closer than before, and Lena gets the sense she’s played herself.

Damn it.

“You don’t even know the answer to that,” Kara defends.

“It’s 16,356.”

“You cheated, you already knew.”

“I do not cheat,” Lena emphasizes, and there’s a pause, their faces a breath apart. Lena resists the desire to look down at the soft pink plush of Kara’s lips.

“You look even more beautiful up close,” Kara says.

“Do you always hit on women in your opponents’ boxes?”

“Never.”

Kara whirls Lena around, brings her back with their stomachs just touching. Their hips a hair away. Kara’s neck tendons strain and flex, and Lena wonders what her skin tastes like. Salty? Sweet?

“You just want me for my money,” she replies with no bite.

“I don’t need your money,” Kara asserts, fierce, and Lena swallows. “I’ve made 1.5 million in prize money alone this year.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve made 1.5 million since the moment we started dancing.”

Kara clenches her jaw, and this time Lena doesn’t fight the temptation to lift her hand from her shoulder and run a thumb over it. It’s a perfect straight line. Kara’s eyes dip to Lena’s mouth, and suddenly not having slept with anyone in months is feeling painfully present to Lena.

“I hate to break this up,” Lex intervenes.

Lena could kill him.

“But this is Sara Lance,” he introduces with a sweep of his arm.

Sara stands behind him, looking like a Swedish goddess herself, and puts her hands on her hips.

“Stealing my good luck charm again, I see?” she directs to Kara, lovely accent and all, but there’s an energy to their meeting that has Lena thinking a fight might break out. Instead, Kara laughs, drops her arms from Lena, and they hug.

“Good run, Danvers,” Lance pinches Kara’s cheek when they pull back.

“I got lucky,” Kara concedes, though Lena thinks nothing of the sort.

“I must say, silver isn’t really my color, anyway,” Lance smiles. “Next time?”

“Is that what I was?” Lena says, late to understanding Sara’s opening statement. “A good luck charm?”

Sara turns to look at her, impish.

“Well, obviously, not any more. You’re never invited back, no hard feelings.”

Lena chuckles, but she gets the sense that this is 100% true. Oh well.

“Kara,” the red-headed woman from before calls to her, like she’s scolding a child. She still looks just as sour-faced as ever. Sara whispers close to Lex, “who is _that_?”

Lena narrows her eyes.

“My trainer, my sister,” Kara quickly explains.

“Cat needs you,” the sister calls again.

“Oh, I have to go,” Kara says more to Lena than to Sara. Sara makes a face like, ‘what am I? Chop liver?’ but Kara ignores her.

“Come to my next match?”

Lena winks. It’s the most poise she’s ever possessed in all her life.

“We’ll see, Supergirl.”  
  



	3. the bicep obsessed tennis AU ch 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more tennis because why not and it's the australian open

Lena's been at the Barker Library for, well, she doesn't know how long. 45 minutes? 26 hours? Time doesn't flow linearly here. She's reserved one of the group study rooms under the thin pretense that Jack would be joining her, but in reality, he hasn't shown up yet, still at the bar. She can still hear him arguing in her mind.

 _"It's not the_ bar _, Lena, it's brunch. Plus, it's 11 AM on a Saturday. You should be there, too."_

 _"If there's a conga line of never-ending Bloody Marys, then it's the_ bar, _Jack_. _You're just drinking first thing in the morning."_

Without him, Lena's papers and books are covering every square inch of the six foot table. There are no windows, the only view she has leading into the grand, domed reading room. Beneath the dome, there are plenty of students in various forms of disarray and sleeplessness. They all look as tired as she does. And even in that room, there are no windows. Only one singular skylight shining down from floors above. It's always reminded Lena of looking up from a well or light filtering into the depths of the ocean, those pale translucent creatures such as herself happy to bathe for once in the sun. It's an ambiguous light, too, a dubious white. Hard to tell if it's morning or evening, but certainly not night.

She looks away from the little world outside of her room, adjusting her glasses and blinking several times down at her laptop. She's written two words on her otherwise blank document.

_In conclusion_

That’s it. She picks up her paper cup of coffee, resolved to write once more, but she's lucky she checks before drinking because it's cold, sludgy, and congealed.

Ew.

Sighing, she rises from her desk to get a refill, more than happy to have a reason to further procrastinate, but she stops dead in her tracks. Through the window of her work station, she sees it. Sees _her_.

There's a woman walking through the reading room, looking puzzled but friendly, sun tan and golden in a white v-neck shirt and sweats (is that _necessary_?!), and Lena's mouth falls open. The woman has garnered the attention of at least 60% of the room, and it's so random to see her there, to see tennis star _Kara Danvers_ at MIT, out of context, that Lena’s brain does a full on stutter. It gives Kara's searching gaze enough time to spot Lena, and she smiles, warm and radiant, waving to put every single muscle in her right arm on display. Kara ignores everyone else in the room, only has eyes for her, and Lena experiences her first full body flush since the National City Open.

All she can think is that she doesn’t belong in this cold, New England landscape. She belongs in Olympus.

But when Kara makes a clear path towards Lena's study room, she snaps out of it, flying through the doors and taking Kara exactly by said offending bicep.

"Hi!" Kara greets her, good-naturedly allowing Lena to corral her into the nearest women's restroom. Kara could easily resist, she could probably even pick Lena up and shot-put throw her, but she seems to enjoy the up close and personal attention.

"How did you get in here?" Lena whisper hisses once the door swings closed.

"Oh, the lady at the front recognized me! She was very friendly—"

"You need a student ID."

Kara smiles. "Maybe I told her I played for MIT."

"You didn't," Lena rolls her eyes.

Kara shrugs.

Inside the bathroom, it's sterile and white, a little chilly. Lena's still holding Kara by the bicep, and her skin is warm against Lena's cold fingers. Kara sways closer, so close that Lena's forced to make a concerted effort to breathe through her mouth lest she lose control of the situation entirely.

"You look so soft in this sweater," Kara reaches her free hand out, picks at the hem of Lena's shirt.

"Stop that." Lena swats at it.

"You wear glasses, too?"

"You're distracting me."

As if to prove her point, Kara takes a step forward, and Lena finds her back hitting the porcelain, tiled wall. She still hasn't let go of Kara's arm, and she finds her space crowded by everything Kara. Warm, tall, and smelling good.

"We're not having our first kiss in a bathroom," Lena states factually.

It breaks the tension that had been simmering, ready to boil, and Kara laughs freely. It resounds against the walls of the bathroom, and Lena almost shushes her. This _is_ a library. But it's too pretty.

"That's presumptuous of you."

" _This_ ," Lena points between them quickly, "is awfully presumptuous of _you_ when I haven't seen or talked to you in more than a month."

"Only because someone keeps dodging my texts and calls."

"I have a PhD to finish."

"And I'm trying to win a calendar slam. So, what?"

"Don't you care about who sees you here?"

"No."

"Then, why are you here?"

"There's a tournament."

"A tournament. Of course. Where is it?"

"In New York." Kara answers, doing something tricky then.

She shifts her weight, innocent enough, until it positions her thigh just between Lena's legs, the cloth of her joggers brushing Lena's jeans. Then, she lifts the arm not held in Lena's vice grip and flattens her hand against the wall near Lena's head, fingers splayed. Lena's thoroughly trapped, a willing victim, but with a chess champion's focus, she persists (somehow) in her line of questioning.

"That's four hours from here."

Kara smiles, goofy, enchanting, at odds with the very dominant and possessive pose of her body.

"Close enough." She shrugs, glazing back down and over Lena's glasses and sweater. "You really are adorable. Do you always dress like this?"

God, Lena's internal body temperature is reaching a dangerous level. Gasping slightly, she asks again,

"What do you want?"

"I'm here for the day. Can I take you out?" Kara asks, her other hand unfeasibly dropping down to Lena's waist. Unfeasible because Lena allows it. Unfeasible because she briefly reconsiders her stance on bathroom first kisses.

"I'm studying."

"So? I need to train."

"Don't pretend you're busy when you came all the way here to ask me to dinner."

Kara laughs. "It was worth a shot. I can wait, though, if you want to finish here? You can meet me at the MIT tennis complex at 7?"

"They let you book practice courts?"

Kara smiles, smug again, and it's infuriating.

"I don't think you've realized it yet, but I'm kind of famous. Some people call me Supergirl."

Lena shoves her gently backwards by the shoulders, and Kara laughs again. Lena finally and reluctantly relinquishes her hold on Kara's bicep.

"On the condition that you never mention that again, fine. But don't come back to this library and interrupt me studying."

"Deal."

* * *

When Lena wraps up at the library, she heads to her off campus home to shower and meticulously but CASUALLY (she insists to Jack who laughs in her face) change her clothes and apply what her mother would consider a modest amount of make-up i.e. a _lot_ of make-up. But it doesn't matter. Really. It doesn't. It's just Kara.

"Sure," Jack had told her.

"Don't you dare tell Lex," she'd threatened him in return, but she's still not convinced she didn't hear the telltale sound of her best friend's fingers tapping on his phone screen.

Whatever.

Lena didn't even know MIT had a tennis team, much less a tennis complex, so she has to look it up on her campus map to find where it is. When she makes her way over at around 6:50 (technically 6:49, but she's not chronically punctual or anything), she's a little surprised that the building doesn't have the Luthor name on it. It seems like the kind of thing Lillian would've snapped up like a new Birkin bag. But Lena had insisted her mother couldn't buy her entrance into grad school, so maybe she was merely waiting politely until after graduation.

Either way, after some amateur fumbling on where to park and what entrance to use, Lena crosses the outdoor courts where she scrupulously avoids the interested eye of several male doubles players and heads indoors.

Inside, Lena sniffs. Indoor courts always have that same, weird, fuzzy smell to them, like recycled air and shoe rubber. But she doesn't have much time to linger on it because that's when she hears a ball strike a few feet away. _That_ ball strike. It echoes off the walls and crescendos like a full, one hundred piece orchestra, and Lena will never admit it until the day she dies, but she knows that sound. She knows the effect it has on her body. A slap, you might say.

Snapping to attention, Lena spots Kara on the court next to her hitting back and forth with a partner, concentrated expression on her face, skin riven with sweat and ruby warm. She's momentarily entranced, and she's not the only one. When she gazes around, mostly to catalogue how many people she's just embarrassed herself in front of, there are more than a dozen watching the court and whispering excitedly to each other. None of them are looking at her.

Thank God.

So, she meanders over to a better viewing spot and plops herself down on a green, plastic bench, distracted for once from the germs that might be inhabiting it and preparing to settle into some very real and very high definition thirst instead.

Unfortunately, Kara notices her almost immediately. She positively beams, her eyes glancing between Lena and the ball, and she delivers a truly crushing cross court blow that her partner nearly falls over himself to receive but ultimately doesn't touch at all.

"Hi," she says again in that same eager cheerfulness, that same on court swagger. She nods at her partner, and he breaks to the other side of the court for water.

Lena can't help but stare. Kara's wearing long black leggings and a dangerously loose, off the shoulder sweatshirt. The kind of garment that's designed to seem thrown together and casual, but is in fact quite devastating. She looks tall and solid. Her sports bra strap is visible and slices across the hint of contracting muscle over her shoulder.

"Is this your attempt at seducing me?" Lena blurts. Kara merely smiles wider, striding up to her, and leans her racquet against the bench.

"Is it working?" she asks, hands on her hips.

_Yes._

Kara continues to grin cockily as she wipes her brow with the back of her hand. She looks like a fucking swimsuit model. It's so reminiscent of the first time Lena saw Kara on court at the National City Open, she nearly whimpers.

"Aren't you thirsty?" she pivots instead, indicating Kara's team waiting for her by the other benches. They are not so subtly checking out Lena with curious gazes.

"Yeah, I'll get some water. Do you want some? You look _parched_."

"Oh, shut up," Lena mumbles with no bite as Kara jogs away laughing.

Lena doesn't have to wait long for her to change and get ready. She's in and out of the locker rooms in less than fifteen minutes, long enough for the head coach of the MIT men's tennis team to wow at Lena's last name. He holds up a ball with the Luthor 'L' on it as if he thinks Lena's never seen it before. She grins and bears it easily enough. It's been happening all her life.

She maintains polite interest, that is, until she sees Kara waving to her from the door. She's changed _again,_ this time into a casual sport jacket and jeans. _Tight_. Thighs rippling. Her shirt is collared and opened a few buttons down. It's somehow another outfit Lena's limited imagination never thought to conjure up, has never even thought how handsome and downright seductive she'd look in something as generic as jeans.

Lena's not even sure if she says goodbye to the coach or more so walks away in a fugue state. All she knows is that she was there at some point, but now she's standing in front of Kara, incredulous.

"You expect me to believe you packed this outfit."

Kara shrugs. "I knew you'd say yes."

Lena lifts an eyebrow, and Kara actually pinkens in the cheeks. An intended effect, Lena knows her eyebrows are powerful. Bashfully, Kara looks down at her feet.

"Well, I'd _hoped_ you'd say yes."

It's cute.

"Right then," Lena acquiesces. "Where are we going?"

"We can walk from here."

"You're taking me to dinner somewhere by _school_?" Lena balks, unable to curb the impertinent nature of her tone.

Kara laughs. "God, you're so snobby. It's hot."

That shuts Lena up.

"After you," Kara holds the door open and motions down the street.

When they start walking, Lena can't help but notice it's actually a gorgeous night. It's not terribly cold, the sun casting its last dying rays of light over Cambridge. Lena can still spot hints of the Charles River through the cross streets, and although it's still early for a Saturday night, there are plenty of students out, raucously laughing and pushing at each other to get into bars.

"You've probably been asked a million times, but how did you get into tennis?"

Again, it's unusual for Lena to even wonder, much less voice it aloud. She's literally never cared about tennis or its athletes in her entire life. But something about Kara's physique and general good disposition are eliciting some uncharacteristic interest.

"Gosh, I can't even remember. I started playing when I was young," Kara answers easily. "Little known fact, I'm actually from Kasnia. I'm not American, but when my parents died, I was adopted."

She delivers it so quickly, so swiftly, it takes Lena slightly aback. It's also strangely serendipitous.

"I'm adopted, too. Also, not American."

Kara looks at her fondly, soft and real. "Really? Where are you from?"

"Ireland."

"Sexy," she teases, pushing her shoulder against Lena's. "Do you have a secret accent?"

Lena's forced to hide her face by pretending to check the street for traffic as they cross it.

"No. Do you?"

"Not anymore," Kara replies wistfully.

When they get to the restaurant (it's not far like Kara had promised), it's cosy. Nice lighting. Not too crowded. Their table is already set up with a nice bottle of wine open and waiting. Lena can practically smell it from here.

"I see you know what you're doing," she indicates the glass with a finger while she takes her seat.

"I had a feeling."

As they settle in, Lena sips her wine and experiences the first blush of alcohol to course through her veins in a week. It feels good. Happy and relaxed, she thinks back to the thread of their conversation.

"So, Alex? From the Ball? She's your adopted sister, then?"

Kara nods, both elbows on the table, hands clasped and leaned across towards Lena. She's so hyper focused, it's hypnotizing.

"How did your adoptive family find you?"

"The Danvers are another tennis family," Kara explains with a relaxed motion of her hand. "It sounds weird, but it's a small world. Alex is a few years older than me. She'd had a chance at going pro, but she was injured."

"How bad?"

"Bad."

"That's a shame," Lena sighs. "And she became your manager?"

"Yep. When I was 16. We travelled everywhere together," Kara smiles in reminiscence. "We were living paycheck to paycheck. It was a crazy time, but it was fun. I thought I might not even make it on the tour, I was days from running out of money, but I got lucky winning a few tournaments in a row."

Lena listens, finding it hard to imagine a world without Kara Danvers in professional tennis. (Which perhaps is a bit hypocritical given she only became aware of her a month ago, but still.)

"I doubt it was luck."

"Sometimes, it is," Kara argues. "That's the worst part. How many legendary players have we missed out on because tennis is such an expensive, exclusive, classist sport?"

Lena laughs, still holding her wine glass, her elbow perched on the edge of the table.

"Don't let the press catch you saying that."

"I won't tell them if you don't."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure they know how I feel on the subject."

"Do they?" Kara reclines. She's shed her sports jacket, hanging it on the back of her chair, and her button down is rolled up at the forearms. It's beguiling. "I've never seen or read anything about you."

"And that's intentional," Lena answers. "How do tennis players train, anyway? How many hours a week? I'm guessing you have a big team."

Kara smirks a little, amused.

"What?" Lena asks, eyebrows furrowed.

"You're not getting off that easy. And, honestly, you should know all that. Your last name is Luthor."

Lena rolls her eyes. She takes another sip of her wine.

"It's just a name."

"A big name."

"It wasn't always mine."

"How did you come to be with the Luthors, then? If you don't mind me asking?"

Lena sighs.

"Lionel Luthor was my biological father. When my biological mother passed away, he took me in. I don't really remember my life before that."

"I read his obituary when it happened. It was really beautiful."

Kara continues to contemplate Lena, thinking, as Lena idly looks around for their waiter. It's not a subject she enjoys, her father's death. She's also not used to being unable to dodge questions on the matter. It's both flattering and uncomfortable to be the sole focus point of Kara's penetrating gaze.

"What do you like about it, anyway?" she lobs out, anything to talk about something else.

"About what, tennis?"

Lena nods.

"I don't know. It's like chess. Like I said at the Ball, tennis players have to be smart. And ruthless. A coach I had once compared singles to slowly strangling your opponent to death. You have to enjoy the domination."

"And when they're dominating you?" Lena asks with a wry smile. Kara mirrors the expression. It's innocuous, but for some reason it feels like flirting.

"It doesn't happen often."

"But when it does?"

"The mental side of the sport is intense," Kara admits, her hands opening. "You're alone. You're weathering a storm. Somehow, you have to stay concentrated. Motivated. You have to stay positive."

"I don't know," Lena tilts her head. "Sounds a bit masochistic to me."

Kara laughs.

"No, you're right, it is. It's punishing. No one ever will ever play a perfect game."

"Yet you all try," Lena teases. "I can identify with that."

"I bet, Ms. Super Genius," Kara lays her hands back on the table. Lena's sorely tempted to take one, to play with those long fingers. She stares down at them, close cropped fingernails. Just visible callouses. Veined.

"So, are the rumors true about the Olympics?"

 _God,_ why had her mind taken her there? Just kidding, she knows why.

"Oh, you mean everyone sleeping with each other?"

Lena nods, eyes glancing back up to Kara's opal blues.

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

Lena scoffs.

"Well, I'd say I have a vested interest. My mother will have an aneurysm if the press starts reporting that we're sleeping together."

Kara's eyes sparkle.

"Oh, is that on the table?"

"Shut up. You know what I mean."

"I told you," Kara smiles again, leaning back in her chair. Lena misses the temptation of her hands. "I don't care what they say."

"Are you sure? It's kind of a big deal in your world."

"You act like we don't share the same world."

"We absolutely don't."

Kara laughs again, and Lena really does enjoy the sound, her neck tipped back, her tendons visible. It brings a smile to her own face.

"Have you ever even picked up a racquet?" Kara asks with disbelief.

"No."

"Have you ever played any sport?"

"Fencing."

"Of course! And, hey, that's kind of the same, isn’t it?"

It's Lena turn to laugh, loudly this time. "No, it is _not_!"

When their waiter finally arrives, Kara's foot slips innocently between Lena's. Innocently, at first. When their food is delivered, it twines, bringing Lena's ankle to her side as Kara devours her dinner with orgasmic delight.

"You act like you've never had a full course meal."

"Food has always made me happy," she shrugs, and Lena takes a mental note. She thinks about cooking for Kara. Taking her to new restaurants, new places even. Showering her with money she's never had a reason to spend. She knows players rarely get to experience the cities they travel to for tour, and she could change that.

But she shakes herself out of the dream. Tennis players _are_ always traveling, always in search of the next best thing. She doesn't want to be another notch on Kara's bedpost. She doesn't want to miss her when she's gone.

Or does she?

* * *

Outside after the date (because for once Lena is absolutely sure that's what it is), Kara stands on the curb, phone in hand and attempting to wrangle an Uber.

"I have to get back to New York," she tells Lena apologetically.

"No problem," Lena nods. "This was… pleasant."

Kara laughs, looking up from her phone. "That good? I drove five hours for pleasant?"

"Look," Lena flusters. "If it's that much of an inconvenience, you can take our plane back."

Kara stares at her, and Lena knows she's being a little bit insufferable, but the words just tumble out.

"We have a jet. Or something. It's in a hanger. Somewhere."

"A jet? Or something? In a hanger somewhere? What is your life, seriously?"

"I rarely use it," Lena tries to play it down. "I'm always here."

"So, I'm told."

Her eyebrows crease.

"Who told you that?"

"Your brother," Kara admits sheepishly, pocketing her phone and giving Lena her full attention. She steps closer, still slightly taller despite being a full step down off the curb.

"Snake."

Kara only smiles, entangling her fingers in Lena's. It feels so natural, an inevitable conclusion, that Lena doesn't even realize it's happened until a moment later.

"How about…" Kara has that glint in her eye, and Lena already knows she's DOA. "I'll use your jet if you come back to watch me in the first round."

Lena's tempted once again, she really is, but... this has Grade A distraction and heartbreak written all over it.

"I can't."

"What about if I make it to the finals?" Kara's eyes go wide, begging, and it's painful. Like a golden retriever, supplicant at the foot of her chair. Lena's never had a dog, but she's beginning to understand the analogies.

"Maybe."

"You can sit in my box."

"That's convenient because I'm pretty sure I'm banned from all others."

"Even better," Kara smiles.

Lena pulls out her phone to check her calendar, hopeful for a reason to say no, hopeful for a reason to say yes.

"Two weeks from now, you said?"

"If all goes according to plan."

"Alright. I'll be there."

Kara steps up the curb then, and she's closer, much closer now. Lena's hand is still in hers.

"So," she toes at the ground. "No bathroom first kisses, but how do you feel about curbside first kisses?"

"Tacky," Lena answers, flat, and Kara laughs. Her neck is even closer now. Right there, bared and vulnerable.

"Tough crowd—" she starts, but Lena doesn't let her finish.

Instead, she pulls Kara roughly in by the lapel of that torturous suit jacket and presses the palm of her free hand flat over her exposed collarbones, rubbing upward, hand clasping at the base of that exquisite neck. She's been waiting all night, all month, all her life for this. Kara gets the hint quick, and she's ready and receptive by the time their lips touch. Her face is warm like Lena's expected from the flush it's worn all night. Like Lena expected from a professional athlete's metabolism. Her lips are warmer. Her arms are around Lena's waist in a flash, squeezing possessive but still respectable given their public position on the sidewalk. But there's nothing at all respectable about what her tongue begins to do, about her lips when they start moving. About the hand that tangles into Lena's dark hair and pulls, bringing her closer. Lena can't tamp it down, she makes a sound, a disgraceful, obscene noise from the very back of her throat, from the base of her.

Kara leans back to smirk again, that ever present smile.

"Yeah?" she asks, and Lena almost has the nerve to push her away, but just then there's a honk from the curb.

Kara's Uber.

She turns, Lena still in her arms, and waves to the very interested face behind the glass.

"Sorry," she says to Lena again, pecking her on the cheek. Lena's eyes flutter closed and open, her hands surrendering the grip she'd had on several parts of Kara's body.

"I had a really good time. Two weeks from now?"

"Two weeks," Lena sighs, a whisper.


	4. Nuclear Winter Special AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: nuclear winter special supercorp AU

Kara arcs high over the ocean, but she can’t stop staring downward. She can’t tear her eyes away from a thousand little waves, tiny white crests, a million prismatic refractions of the sun and the clouds. It’s beautiful.

She’s seen water before, of course, but not like this. Not vast like space, reaching so far and wide it curves a half circle onto the horizon. She’s never been allowed to stray very far from Russia, from Lex.

This mission was different, though.

“Collect my sister in Metropolis,” he’d told her. “Take this suit. It will protect you from the radiation. It has solar cells to regenerate your powers.”

Kara had accepted the gift graciously, bowing. She did her best to hide the pang of uncertainty.

“Are you sure she’s still alive?”

Lex had smiled derisive, a joke only he understood.

“We’re like cockroaches, Kara. A Luthor isn’t easily killed. Not even by a nuclear bomb.”

The timing had seemed strange. It still did. Lex had never asked after his sister once, not even months after the bombs had been dropped.

_Why now?_

Kara looks up from the water and into the distance. Unlike the candy wisp pinks and oranges that surround her, there’s nothing out there. It’s a void of color. If she didn’t know, it might only look like a storm, one hell of a hurricane.

But she does know.

Metropolis is shrouded in gray, covered in a kind of blanket deep black only the total absence of the sun could create. Kara contemplates her luck on arriving on yet another world on the brink of collapse, another world that might go out with a bang.

Her parents wouldn’t save her now.

She’s nervous, ribbons of fear flaring out through her chest as she gets closer. The gray descends around her like a curtain dropped. If the suit malfunctioned, if something happened, she’d be powerless. She’d be stuck here.

Kara doesn’t want that. Lex had put her through a series of trials when she’d been a teenager. He’d experimented with her limits. She’s intimate with pain, well-versed in weakness.

“You’ve never known true helplessness,” he’d remarked with a sneer, hand hovering over the shut-off. “Your courage isn’t earned. Your bravery isn’t tested.”

She hadn’t cared about bravery, not in that moment, not choking on noxious fumes.

“You’re an alien,” he’d continued, increasing the dial, the concentration of gas. “You have no idea what it’s like to be human, discarded and isolated, a creature abandoned by the gods.”

She still doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.

She drops out of the sky and lands on the roof of a crumbling skyscraper. Her feet kick up a plume of dark ash. The sign on the building hangs limp next to her, a gun metal gradient bent and ripped, maws open.

_The Daily Planet_ , Kara guesses. It’s missing a few letters.

She idles. There’s a cold that penetrates her suit, grips her muscles, her bones, saps the sun from her skin. There’s a quiet, too, that makes Kara want to rip her helmet off and scream. Just to hear something.

She just narrowly avoids the impulse.

Instead, she patrols, using her x-ray vision to look for the entrances Lex had described.

“Rodents live underground.”

But she sees nothing, finds nothing. Not for hours. Not until she’s nearly mad with sensory deprivation. Not until she’s landing, a gloved hand swiping over a thick hatch. Not until she feels something sharp, scissor-like harpoon her suit.

The air tightens in her helmet and bursts in a whoosh. Her body seizes in pain. She looks down, shocked and stunned by the bright, brushstroke of color on the otherwise lifeless landscape.

It’s the ruby red of her own blood. Then, darkness.

* * *

She’s being carried, the coarse, unwelcome absence of her powers scratching just beneath her skin. She hates it. She’s unwhole, a brainless drone, a god cast from Olympus.

She’s blindfolded and starving.

On instinct alone, she starts thrashing. She throws her arm out and connects with something solid. Liquid sprays her face. There’s shouting. She touches her tongue to it, but it’s coppery and metallic.

The journey is rougher after that. She’s wrapped up in tight confines. Sealed off. She’s dragged in a sack like a boneless dead body through a series of tunnels, a network, a maze. She’s underground. She thinks she hears water at one point, and when the hood is ripped off of her face, her eyes adjust to find a looming mountain of glass, mutant creatures lurking just beyond the shadows. It looks like the ocean floor.

She doesn’t have time to marvel, to ask, before she’s struck again, and it all goes dark.

* * *

Kara wakes with a groan. She flutters her eyes, quickly recognizes the trappings of a cell by the flimsy, loud mattress beneath her. The woolly itch of a practical blanket. The harsh white lights. She’s no stranger to containment.

Not with Lex.

She stands, feeling for the wound at her side. She fingers the hole in her heather gray track suit, the stiff dried blood on the fabric. The stain is circular, the size of a dinner plate, but her skin is closed. The scar is mottled and healed, but when she clenches a fist, she’s still weak. Powerless.

Hm.

She gazes around. There’s a glass wall in front of her, what appears to be a lab beyond that. She shakes ash out of her hair.

“What did you do to me?” she asks the figure lingering like a shadow in the room. Kara can’t see her, but she can sense her there.

There’s no movement, no reply.

“I can hear your heart,” Kara announces. It’s delicate and rabbit quick.

A woman emerges with a dry swallow, thrust into the light.

“We found you half dead in a gutter,” she rasps. Her voice has an air of detachment that feels calculated. Practiced. Regardless, it’s still speaks to an elegance, a solid command of language. “We saved your life.”

“You attacked me,” Kara asserts with a scientific certainty.

“You attacked my personnel.”

“I apologize,” Kara tilts her head slightly, allowing her eyes to wander over the woman. “I was not myself.”

The woman makes no move to espouse her own apologies. Meanwhile, Kara approaches the glass. She looks closer.

The woman’s dressed utilitarian, in all black. Her hair is braided tight, shines white under the light. Her skin… is so pale, she looks like a creature grown and nurtured in the dark. Her eyes are the liveliest part to her, a bioluminescent green, a plant flourishing in a cave. Kara imagines them in the sun.

“You’re Lena Luthor,” she seeks to confirm. It’s not the first time Kara’s seen her, but it is the first time she’s seen her since the attack.

Lena nods curtly. Kara exhales, briefly fogging the glass.

She used to hoard photos of Lena, secret, hidden in her cell like acorns in the earth. She’s read her published articles, watched her at televised conferences. Lex would sometimes talk about her.

It’s a bit like meeting a celebrity. Or a visage that haunts her dreams. She feels starstruck, flush with an embarrassment that Lena couldn’t possibly know.

“You’re so much like him,” she finds herself saying.

Lena flinches at that.

“Why are you here?”

“Your brother asked me to bring you home.”

“Home?” Lena scoffs. “My brother dropped the bombs, Red Daughter. Your cousin died saving Metropolis. Does that mean nothing to you?”

Kara pauses, taking a deep breath through her nose.

“I never knew him. He never came for me.”

Lena takes two steps forwards, and Kara moves so that her nose brushes the barrier, whisper close. It’s cold.

“My brother seeks to consolidate his power. He capitalized on the momentum and hysteria of the political climate. He started the fire and the sky still rains with ash.”

Kara is seized by an acute déjà vu. Her whole body responds to Lena’s voice, to Lena’s image, with a _do I know you?_

She raises glass a hand to the glass, fingers splayed. She sees Lena’s eyes fall to it, her hand twitch near her side, an instinct repressed.

Kara thrills in it. She’s never wanted the fine scrutiny of a woman this badly. She wonders vaguely what Lena smells like. Earth? Rock? Chemicals? Sparsely used, priceless found perfume?

She glances back down. Lena has scientist’s hands. Scabbed. Scarred. Nimble. Kara has a vision of running her own hands up Lena’s forearms and squeezing.

Lena’s disposition changes, contours and reforms. Two of Lena’s fingers rub together before she phrases her next statement.

“I’m not going with you.”

“You’re dying,” Kara replies. “From radiation poisoning. Your people will suffer. You’ve already made so many sacrifices—”

“Don’t talk to me about sacrifice,” Lena cuts her off suddenly, her jaw going so taut, it becomes a square angle.

Kara sighs. She imagines a timeline where they meet differently. It’s sunny. There’s coffee. They discuss music, movies. Quantum entanglement. It’s a far gone fantasy, but it’s briefly calming.

“How long will you keep me here?” she asks instead.

Lena’s mouth parts, a petal red. It reminds Kara of when she used to smear the juice of a berry on her lips and pretend it was lipstick, of giggling in the forest with Mikhail.

“You’re a pretty lady,” he had joked with her. Lena is a pretty lady, too.

Lena retreats to a table to her right, and Kara follows, mirroring her from behind the glass.

“I’m not sure,” she mutters. “We need to wait until your irradiation goes down.”

Lena fiddles with a tool half-heartedly. Kara thinks she’s stalling.

“I’ll be back to check on you later,” she says, suddenly brusque. She turns to leave.

“Wait,” Kara calls out, her hands back on the glass, chasing the disappearing form of this beautiful woman.

“Do you play chess?”

Lena stills, rigid.

“Do you have food? Books?”

Kara longs to ask for a romantic one.

Lena returns later that night. She brings a foldable chess set, _The Great Gatsby,_ and a bitter stick of dark chocolate.


	5. food kink AU sort of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> several anon prompts that i made all about food.

**Part I.** _"I love you with all my ... "_

“I love you with all my heart and soul,” Kara directs lovingly at her triple cheese meatball sub.

Lena watches, fork paused half way to her mouth (unlike Kara she uses _utensils_ ), taking in the scene of Kara swooning, no, waxing poetic over her midday lunch. Her eyebrows thread as Kara kisses the bun, mini-hugs the sub in both hands as if it were a weak woodland creature, and Lena inwardly works herself through a list on why it is not appropriate to be jealous of a deli sandwich.

A list that is quickly distracted from completion at the sound Kara makes when she takes her first bite. Lena’s forced to put her fork down in favor of hiding her face behind a glass of water. She pretends to sip, dragging a fortifying breath through her nose.

It’s excruciating the way Kara eats, the way Kara is _always_ eating. It’s unselfconscious and messy. She licks her fingers, she runs her tongue up and down the length of her butter knives. She bites cleanly into apples, teeth pearly against the meat of the fruit. It makes it impossible for Lena to divert her attention from where, well, where it wants to go. To Kara’s attractive physical assets. Her lips, her hands, her mouth, her tongue. And the noises Kara makes, too… god, it’s criminal. The moan that just left her throat, deep and guttural, it should be illegal.

“Lena,” she whines, elongated and high pitched. Lena squeezes her fork. “You just have to try this.”

Lena is already lifting a hand to say no, barely possessed of her own free will as it is. Kara also does this, too, always invites Lena to partake in her food orgies, but Lena can’t. She’s wearing white today, and she’d just reapplied lipstick before lunch (not for Kara, of course, plenty of people would see her out in public.)

But Kara is having none of it, already moving out of her seat and around the table. Lena goes still as a startled fawn as Kara crowds against her side. She tries to remember what normal people do with their absolutely gorgeous, absolutely platonic best friends when they surge into the bounds of each other’s personal space. They probably say,

“Oh,” as their absolutely gorgeous, absolutely platonic best friend pinches off a bite and holds it out to eat. And Kara’s not holding it out to Lena’s hand, but to her mouth.

Kara’s staring at her expectantly while Lena’s internal monologue goes something like, _ohmygod whatifmylipstouchherfingerswhenitakeit whatthefuck_ , but Kara continues to wear a pleasantly light smile endearingly garnished at the corner with tomato sauce.

Lena itches to reach up and remove it with her thumb, her tongue.

_Fuck._

“Trust me,” Kara coaxes at Lena’s complete lack of movement. “It’s going to be so good, and you’ll think of me every time you eat it.”

_Fuck_.

* * *

**Part II.** _"I looked at her deep in her eyes, feeling a warm shiver down my arms. "Can I have the 10 piece McNugget meal, please?""_

Kara looks at her deep in her eyes, feeling a warm shiver run down her arms.

“Can I have the 10 piece McNugget meal, please?”

Lena’s jaw works strangely. Kara knows she’s doing that thing, that thing Alex hates, when she leans forward, cants her head to the side, and begs like a Golden Retriever with big blue eyes. But Kara is shameless, and she tries her best to put on the air of someone who is so desperately hungry they might just die if not promptly fed McNuggets. She even goes the extra mile, not something she normally does with Alex, and clutches Lena’s upper arm, the muscle tensing as if jolted. She’s that much closer to her best friend, so close that Kara’s long blonde hair falls onto the lapel of Lena’s suit jacket. She’s close enough to see Lena’s green shrouded pupils dilate.

“Of-of course,” Lena stammers, and Kara smiles, warm with victory. She drops her head onto Lena’s shoulder, why not, what a comfy place, and gazes happily into the front of the black town car.

“George,” Lena directs a little raspily. “Pull into the drive through, would you?”

Kara perks back up.

“Oh, can I order? I’ve never gotten McDonald’s from a limo before!”

“Uh--“

Excitably, Kara crawls on all fours across Lena’s lap to reach the opposite window. The window rolls down without prompting, and she shoots a sunny smile at George in thanks as she balances her hands on the door.

“Hi, can I please have a 10 piece McNugget, a Big Mac, two large fries, and a McFlurry? And--oh--did you want anything, Lena?”

She glances back to find Lena whipping her head up so fast Kara hears something crick in her neck.

“Nothing! I mean, no, I don’t need anything.”

Kara smiles at her.

“You can have some of mine. If I feed them to you, they’re not really calories!”

Lena winces.

* * *

**Part III.** _"Kara! Ready for brun-"_

“Kara! Ready for brun--”

Lena stops dead in the open apartment doorway. Why? Because her best friend is standing in her living room with white-gloved hands, arms opened wide like the beginning of a jazz cabaret. And looking much too proud of herself.

“Why are you dressed,” Lena pauses, the sentence costing her a modicum of pride to utter, “as a hot dog?”

“Lena!” Kara exclaims happily, twirling, the top of her costume just grazing the ceiling fan. “It’s Wiener Wednesday at Pink’s Hot Dogs! If you’re dressed as a hot dog, you get free hot dogs! All day!”

The way that Kara is celebrating this fact is comical and borderline manic at best, and any dreams Lena had of diverting this beautiful Wednesday afternoon into something classy crumbles under the brilliance of that unrelenting enthusiasm. Regardless, she crosses the room, smiling and slipping a hand into one of Kara’s.

She pulls lightly at the fabric.

“Where did you get this unholy creation?”

Kara squeezes her hand, forcing Lena to revel in the shame of being attracted to her even dressed as a pork product.

“Well--”

“Please don’t say your mother made it--”

“Eliza made it!”

Lena registers a scuff behind her and turns to see Alex, gazing at Kara’s costume with a look of long suffering.

“Wiener Wednesday,” she mutters. “Mom’s stitching is getting good.”

Kara agrees emphatically while Alex’s gaze drops downwards. Lena releases Kara’s hand as casually as possible and makes what she hopes is a believable excuse (it didn’t sound English, but who’s listening) and exits towards the bathroom.

“Why are you blushing?” she hears Alex ask before she closes the door. “Is it because she was touching your wiener--,” a swatting sound, “shit! That’s going to bruise!”

* * *

**Part IV.** _Kara is working late. Lena brings her dinner._

Kara is working late. She’s the very last person huddled at her desk in the normally very loud and boisterous office. Several of the large televisions situated on the walls around her quietly broadcast the news, but she absolutely _has_ to finish this article before her eyes go permanently crossed and Snapper fires her for good.

What’s another word for ‘acute?’ Sharp? Severe? God, Kara hates writing sometimes. Sometimes she laments the fact that she could’ve gone into science instead. She could’ve brought Earth into a golden age of technological discovery.

But that’s what her best friend Lena is for.

_“--Lena Luthor visits Gotham City,”_ the television nearest to her drones, and Kara smiles faintly to herself as she types.

_“Sources spotted the tech billionaire meeting with Bruce Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises. Could the two be pairing up to develop cutting edge electronics? Or was the trip for pleasure not business?”_

Kara’s smile withers, her head snaps up.

That was an odd choice of words. Pairing up? And pleasure?!

She’s staring at the television, at Bruce Wayne’s slick black hair, his glacial blue eyes, so hard she can feel her eyes burn, so when a voice cuts in behind her,

“Watching me on the news, Kara?”

Her heat vision nearly activates, causing her to slap her hands over her eyes and promptly fall out of her chair.

A musical note of laughter rolls over her as Kara scrambles to her feet.

“If you missed me, you’re always welcome to call,” Lena tells her with a smile painted in Kara’s favorite shade of lipstick, show stopper red.

“Lena!” Kara trills, desperate to fight the embarrassed blush on her cheeks. “You’re here! And you brought food!”

Lena holds up a plastic bag of takeout, and in a Pavlovian response that is both perfectly simple and entirely predictable, Kara's mouth actually waters at the sight of both of them.

She quickly ushers Lena to a table so they can sit, and Kara attempts to temper the impulse to tear into the Chinese food like a wolverine. Judging from the look on Lena’s face, she’s only partially successful, but her friend is still smiling, only picking at a dumpling here and there.

“How was Gotham?” Kara asks through a mouthful of food, indicating the TV. She wipes soy sauce from her lip, and Lena watches her a bit intently.

“Gotham?” she asks, distracted. “Oh, productive, I suppose.”

Kara nods amiably. “Bruce Wayne, huh?”

“Hm,” Lena replies, touching a napkin to her mouth.

“He’s so--” _don’t say it,_ Kara tells herself. “He’s so--”

_No. Don’t say it._

“He’s--he’s so hot.”

_Damn it_.

“I mean, he’s attractive, right?” Kara spirals. _Double damn it._ “People find him attractive? He’s got kind of a,” _please stop,_ “animal magnetism?”

Kara finally shuts her mouth, and she’s pretty sure her teeth could’ve torn through steel just then, but Lena only looks at her, expressing a three-way combination of emotion: surprise, confusion, and amusement.

“An animal magnetism?” she repeats back.

“And money,” Kara adds, _oh god it’s happening again._ “So much money,” _stop, why am I laughing like that?_ “Doesn’t he only date models? And other rich people? Is there like a secret billionaire Tinder?”

“You sure know a lot about him, Kara,” Lena deflects. “Does someone have a crush?”

“A crush?!” Kara balks.

“Then, you’re jealous?” Lena asks, lifting an eyebrow.

_Fuck._ The eyebrow. And, oh god, Lena’s doing that boardroom breakdown thing. That thing where Kara imagines her sliding a hand on the table, another on her hip, as she looks down on an insubordinate investor.

_She’s going to crack me._

“Noooo,” Kara defends, doing that utterly mad laugh again. “Me? Jealous? There’s nothing to be jealous of, I mean, I’m Super--” Kara draws out the r like Tony the Tiger, “--rrrrrrrrrrrr awsesome.”

Somewhere in National City, Alex groans, but Lena only smiles fully, her perfect beautiful teeth on display, her neck tipped back.

“That’s true,” she concedes, leaning forward and plucking the dumpling out of Kara’s hand. “You _are_ superrrrrrrr awesome, Kara Danvers.”


	6. abs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anon prompt: abs and baby aliens and critters are all of supergirl's insta content for sure. Lena likes all the alien and critter pictures and then silently bookmarks the ab ones

Lena’s staring at a bookmarked photo of Supergirl’s abs when she hears boots touch down on her balcony. In her haste to stand, she drops her phone. It juggles between both of her hands before her fist connects and it slams into the plate glass between them. Lena prays to every god she knows it lands face down.

It lands face up, and Supergirl glances down to see her own abs on the other side of the glass. Lena doesn’t flinch, crossing her arms. She doesn’t reach for her phone, too proud to acknowledge the evidence between them. She clears her throat. Her voice still comes out high, _damn it._

“What can I do for you today, Supergirl?”

* * *

Kara is up for an early morning patrol, feeling slightly substandard after a nasty fight with an Aellon. She closes her eyes, absorbing a few needed minutes of warm yellow sun radiation, when suddenly she catches the tendril of Lena’s increased heart rate.

It’s 7:30 AM, she thinks. And Lena’s already at L-Corp. Her best friend doesn’t usually exercise in the morning, what if something bad is happening?

Before she can think much of it, Kara lands on Lena’s balcony. She watches Lena stand (too quickly) and then flail wildly. She takes a step closer, even more concerned at the commotion, until she sees Lena’s dropped, face up phone.

_Oh._

_**Oh.** _

“What can I do for you today, Supergirl?”


	7. the tit obsessed coffee shop AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: pre-dating supercorp where lena knows how often kara stares at her boobs and she realises that she really enjoys eliciting that reaction from her. Basically coquettish lena who's holding back on making them an official thing bc she wants to enjoy this period of flirting and being chased after

“Oh shit,” Lena curses. “There she is.”

Without warning, she drops below the register, reaching indiscreetly under her shirt.

“Lena, this is becoming shameless,” Sam judges from above.

“Just block me from James, won’t you?”

The coffee shop is lax, but even Lena’s not bold enough to push their ‘uniform requirements’ to the very limit on this balmy, Tuesday afternoon.

“Why are you still torturing this poor woman? She seems nice,” Sam whines, but despite the defense, she steps in front of Lena and covers her view of their manager.

“Torture?” Lena balks, unsnapping her bra. “Please, she loves it.”

“It’s cruel.”

“Done,” she hisses a second later, ignoring Sam and plucking her bra out from under her shirt. She stuffs it unceremoniously into an empty, clean coffee cup below the counter.

Lena snaps upright just as Kara sweeps into the shop. She’s a vision in a long beige coat. Her blonde hair glows butter yellow in the dying sun. Kara’s eyes meet hers, and there’s an ephemeral smile there, a smile that’s just woken up, taken it’s first breath of something sweet, and exhaled. Then, her eyes glance down. Lena’s let her apron fall to her hips, revealing her t-shirt. It’s thin, gauzy, and borderline threadbare. It’s intentional. When Lena poses her hands on her hips, her nipples peak through.

Kara tenses, she pinkens. She doesn’t stop walking towards the counter. She also doesn’t mark the elderly woman crossing her path. She doesn’t notice the clutched steaming hot mug of coffee, the woman’s look of rapt anticipation. Kara keeps coming, eyes still trained downward, unflapping from a clear collision course.

It’s absolute pandemonium.

“I feel guilty,” Sam says with a resigned sigh. Kara’s nearly bowled the old woman over and coffee’s splattered over the floor, the walls, like an arterial crime scene. James rushes over to help, to appease with his easy, confident smile.

“I feel like an accomplice to your crime.”

Lena merely smirks, flush with victory. She pulls her apron back up and over her shoulders.

“Your breasts need an insurance policy. Look at the mayhem they’ve caused.”

Lena watches the scene thoughtfully.

“What are the chances I could wear my apron over just my bra without getting fired?”

“Slim to none.”

“Shame.”

* * *

It hadn’t always been like this. It had started out fairly innocuous. Kara’s a regular. She’d been coming into The Sentient Bean like clockwork on Tuesdays and Thursdays for almost a year. She teaches for a graduate program at the campus nearby, that much Lena has figured out. She’s polite to the staff, dreamy in her comments about the pastries, and charming by all accounts. Plus, she’s gorgeous in a homegrown, corn fed, Midwest manners kind of way.

But.

Lena’s also discovered by a happy accident that Kara, the hapless lesbian, is highly prone to giving in to temptation. What started out as Lena playing absently with the long chain of her necklace on one slow afternoon at the shop quickly progressed to Lena intentionally touching her exposed collarbone. It became Lena wearing thin fabric and bright pink bras. It became mesh tops and plunging necklines. It became Kara’s complete inability to function.

What can she say? Lena enjoys Kara’s Pavlovian response.

“It’s honestly a little desperate,” Sam condemns.

“It’s called foreplay, Samantha. Understandable you haven’t heard of it, being heterosexual and all–”

“Stop talking,” Sam holds up a hand.

After that, they’re busy busing tables and whipping up cappuccinos for a few bleary-eyed, sleep deprived college students.

“Why don’t you just leave her your number?” Sam wanders back over to her, dropping dirty cups into the wash basin.

“Are you kidding? And ruin the mystery? This is the best part.”

Sam taps her finger nails on the counter, nonplussed.

“Come on,” Lena continues. “You know the second I give her my number, she’ll call, and then I’ll find out something terrible like she’s a drug addict or an art student or secretly obsessed with toe nails.”

“Or she’ll find out your last name and reject you?”

Lena doesn’t comment.

“Just let me have my fun,” she pouts.

“Fine, fine. But I’m not taking her order this time,” she shoves off the counter right as Kara enters the shop. “I feel like a voyeur with the way she watches you make her drink,” she grumbles.

Lena shrugs. Fine by her. More face time with Kara. Sam knows she’ll get elbowed in the kidney, too, if she tries to make Kara’s drink.

“Hi Kara,” Lena greets, licking her lips. Kara smiles, eyes flicking down.

“Uh-hi,” she falters hands reaching to clench at the counter as if that will keep her steady.

Lena hasn’t even worn anything too outrageous today. Just the same long silver chained necklace that started it all. It disappears into the cleavage of her tight black shirt, and she has her hair braided, all twelve ear piercings in. The sleeve of her tattoo winds up her left forearm. She’s looking innocent and modest, if you ask her.

But she can tell Kara doesn’t see it that way. There’s an awkward beat where the unfortunate soul seems to momentarily forget why she’s there.

“White mocha?” Lena supplies.

“Oh-uh-yes, please.”

Lena saunters to the espresso machine, prepping to make the drink. Her jeans are black (and tight), too. She can feel Kara’s eyes on her ass like a hot brand.

“How-how much?” Kara chokes out.

“On the house,” Lena swivels her head to smile. Kara’s eyes flick up. Lena winks.

Somewhere in the background, Sam groans.

Kara doesn’t hear it, moving to wait near the stir sticks, watching Lena’s hands work with a trained proficiency. There’s an intensity to her interest that has Lena blushing slightly, and when she goes to hand Kara the drink, their fingers brush.

“Bye Lena,” Kara waves, walking backwards. She also does a clumsy peace sign, too.

“Please put that poor girl out of her misery,” Sam whispers from behind Lena.

* * *

Lena’s not ready for Kara to come in on a Monday morning. She’s dressed to code. Her makeup’s not on. She’s enraptured in a heavy daytime fantasy about getting back into bed. She and Sam had gone out last night, and she can still taste the pickle shots on the back of her tongue. She has bad breath, looks like hammered shit, and probably smells like a stained bar pool table.

So, naturally, there her crush is, frazzled and positively harassed as she comes rushing up to the counter.

“Look, Lena, my sister said I just can’t wait any longer, and I was wondering if–”

Her eyes glance up for the first time, roving over Lena’s outfit.

“Why are you dressed like that?“

“Huh?” Lena asks after a beat, deciding to play dumb. “Like what?”

“You’re–you’re dressed like,” she waves her finger at the two other employees in the shop. “Everyone else.”

“What do you mean? I do work here—”

“No!” Kara nearly shouts, and Lena can’t help but let a smile break.

“So, you have been doing that on purpose?” Kara asks, sounding adorably persecuted.

“Maybe,” Lena hushes, leaning across the counter and into Kara’s personal space. She can smell a perfume then, maybe a shampoo or a lotion. Lena wants to fold herself into it forever.

Kara takes a huge breath, breathes out, and Lena can feel it on her lips.

“Go out with me.”

She smiles.

“Okay.”


	8. the tit obsessed coffee shop AU ch 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a first date gone awry and an accidental second date. maybe too much time spent on smells. trigger warning for cannabis smoking.

Kara Danvers gets Lena’s phone number. Lena of the Sentient Bean. Lena, her coffee shop tormenter.

Kara Danvers gets Lena’s phone number after twelve months of torture, after fifty-two weeks of tits in face. It’s like finally climbing Everest, the biggest tit. Or swimming an English Channel full of breasts. Her sister may not understand the feat of strength it required, but it’s an accomplishment for Kara. Between managing labs and dealing with frazzled, stressed out grads, it’s a wonder that Kara’s engaged in conversation with anyone under the age of 60 and not a student. Much less, a woman.

When she was still in school, female physics and astronomy majors were more myth than reality. And interested in women? Practically a legend. Kara’s been starved. She’s out of practice. She’s a bit like a captive who’s been held several years underground and who’s lost their tentative grasp of social interaction. One beautiful awkward gay unicorn looking for another beautiful (hopefully charming) gay unicorn.

She deserves a prize for asking the barista equivalent of Angelina Jolie out.

So, after spending an altogether gratuitous amount of time trying to decide the whens, wheres, and hows of their date, she settles on inviting Lena to the local music venue near campus, The Phantom Zone. And Kara’s proud to say she didn’t even use that many emojis when she did it. Five is a normal amount, right?

**_😃🎼🎤🌈👩🏼🤝👩🏻_ **

Kara’s pretty sure that’s good. It’s definitely cool.

Lena replies back with a,

**🖤**

Fine. That’s cooler.

But Kara can’t hold it against her. Lena _is_ cool. Lena with her black nails, her arm length tattoo. Lena with her tongue piercing.

Kara runs into her bedroom door thinking about it. She rights herself, focuses solidly on getting dressed for this date. She’s changed so many times she’s basically stuck in a time paradox, doomed to repeat changing in and out of the same outfits forever.

At some point, Alex Facetimes Kara (her sister has some sort of direct psychic access to her inner, flustered subconscious, it’s like she has a Google Alert set for Kara’s dithering), and she tells Kara to wear the long sleeved, ruffled checked top tucked into jeans and a belt. It’s her favorite shirt, so she does, but Kara still feels nervous, chewing on her lip in front of the mirror. She looks so preppy, even on the outskirts of country western, a local dressed in their Sunday best for a hoedown in Middle America, and Lena’s just so… Lena.

Punk. Devil may care. _Cool._

Lena makes Kara feel like she’s in one of those dreams where she shows up to school in only her underwear. Or that she’s missed a whole semester’s worth of classes. Lena feels like she was designed in a lab or grown in a test tube, genetically modified to take Kara out. Her eyes, her face, her body, (her breasts), it’s a kaleidoscope of too many of Kara’s specific tastes in women, a cosmic collision of her weaknesses, and the freefall of it all is overwhelming, almost inevitable.

“Shoot,” Kara whispers to herself, having completely forgotten what she was doing.

Did she disassociate from her body thinking about Lena? Did she sleep walk into the kitchen? Is it still Saturday?

She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and it sticks. Is it normal to swallow this much before a date?

 _Stop swallowing_ , Kara tells herself. _Stop it._

She swallows again. Then, she brushes her teeth for a second or third time.

Eventually, she gets herself to the venue thirty minutes early, running out of meaningless chores to do around the house (she’d started getting ready at 8 AM this morning.) She’d also stress eaten everything in her fridge except for one brick of moldy old cheese. But she can cut the mold off later (she really needs groceries.)

She migrates to the bar where she leans, partially standing, and drums her fingers so emphatically on the countertop that it garners the attention of the bartender (twice.)

“You sure you don’t want another one?” he asks, and Kara glances at her first beer, untouched and room temperature.

“I’m fine,” she tries to wave him away.

“It might take the edge off,” he smiles uncertainly, and Kara nearly barks out a laugh.

There’s only one thing that might take the edge off and that’s— _oh, god, there’s Lena._

Kara takes a sharp, survival based breath through her nose while her soul attempts to exit her body because, well... Lena’s wearing a cropped short leather jacket. It’s a jacket that’s designed to maim and murder those who witness it. With black jeans, boots, a loose ponytail, and a white v neck, her overall ensemble is more appropriate for an off duty day disguise of a marvel super hero. But the jacket. Kara instantly has an impulse to press her face into it like a cat and purr.

She makes a valiant effort not to do so as Lena smiles, satin soft and slight. It eases Kara’s generalized neurological breakdown, but it’s short lived. When Lena makes her way over, Kara can suddenly smell the leather, deep and oily rich in fragrance, and her eyes betray her ( _they always freaking do._ ) They sink to a less than northern region of Lena’s body.

Lena’s not wearing a bra. Again.

“Hello, Kara.”

Kara’s eyes instantly jump back up.

“Hi Lena,” she smiles in a warm and ever present attempt not to shame herself further.

There’s a small and awkward hitch in conversation, and they linger there in each other’s personal zones, two planets in a gravitational standoff.

Kara’s not sure what’s appropriate for her painful-crush-turned-first-date. A hand shake? A hug? She’s never touched Lena.

Her brain instead tries to fire a litany of half formed synapses; to her limbs ( _unlock_ ), to her mouth ( _close if you’re not going to say something)_ , and to her eyes ( _stop looking down_ ), but with less than ideal results. She’s pretty sure her arm only flails wildly by her side.

“You look nice,” she forces out.

She wants to grimace. She’s the epitome of inarticulate.

“Only nice?” Lena teases with a lifted eyebrow.

Exactly. Exactly that.

Kara’s going to die on this date.

Lena smirks and turns her attention to the bar. It takes less than a nanosecond to regain the bartender’s attention. Possibly even a negative second. He’s already been staring at Lena.

Kara narrows her eyes.

“A gin and tonic, please.”

“Sure thing,” he replies with an immediate over eagerness.

Who is this guy? What a bad bartender. The nerve to—to look at Lena!

“On my tab!” Kara calls after him, quick to shut any thoughts of _that_ down.

“Kara,” Lena beseeches, perched forward on her elbows and looking devastating. “You don’t have to pay for me.”

“It’s only fair,” Kara tells her earnestly (also, she’d buy a Clydesdale if Lena asked.) “You give me free coffee all the time.”

 _Look, I can construct a sentence again_ , she cheers for herself internally. She has such poise and grace and confidence!

“True,” Lena smiles, arching her back in a stretch.

Kara loses the ability, she never had it.

But at least Lena looks away, gives Kara a brief reprieve from those intensely examining green eyes. It’s dark in the venue, hazy with light. Kara watches Lena gaze around at the faded brick walls, the loitering patrons. It’s getting more crowded closer to show time. It smells vaguely antiseptic, vaguely grungy like old dreadlocks.

In undergrad, Kara once threw up in a mop bucket here, a fact she makes a mental note not to share with Lena.

“Have you heard of the band?” Lena asks conversationally, eyes roaming the red lit stage.

“No,” Kara answers a little dreamy, beleaguered by visions of Lena pressing to her back to Kara’s front, dancing, Kara’s hands on her hips, moving to the beat of the music.

Lena turns fully back to Kara, and the lapels of her jacket drift open just so. Kara hasn’t pondered too metaphysically on tits or anything, but Lena’s are just… so perfect.

When she looks up, she’s sure Lena has caught her. For the fifty-seven millionth time.

But, of course, the bartender takes that moment to interrupt them.

“Here you go,” he says to Lena, and only Lena, sliding her drink over.

“Thank you,” Kara dismisses him with a curt nod. He takes the hint, walking away and looking disappointed.

“So, what necessitates so much caffeine, anyway?” Lena asks, taking a sip. Kara doesn’t watch her lips on the edge of the glass or anything. “What do you do? You work at the school?”

Kara lights up.

“Oh, I’m a lab manager. I do lab scheduling and make sure the laboratories are safe,” she gushes. She probably said the word ‘lab’ way too many times.

_Lab, lab, lab, lab._

“For grad students,” Kara compels herself to continue. “Sometimes, I help with tech support for the Electronics and Optics… labs. I studied Physics and Astronomy in undergrad.”

“Oh, so you’re a nerd,” Lena baits, and Kara smiles in response. It’s not the first time she’s heard something of the sort [mainly from her sister (which is rich given she’s in medical school.)]

“Depends on your definition, I guess.”

“Tell me something cool about space,” Lena prompts, leaning closer.

Kara blushes hot. It’s not fair that Lena’s somehow even more attractive in close proximity. Kara suddenly aches for the buffer of the coffee bar between them.

“Oh, there’s so much, Lena,” she manages after some involuntary beguilement. “Did you know that technically both the Sun and Jupiter orbit the same point in space? That Jupiter doesn’t orbit the sun?”

“I did not,” Lena smiles, charmed.

“What else? Oh! GPS has to account for both General Relativity and Special Relativity. And then there’s a planet, 55 Cancri e, that might be made out of diamonds. And the floating space ocean, of course,” Kara’s mind jumps from topic to topic. She’s not sure what she’d hoped to accomplish by launching into ninety-nine popular space facts, but Lena’s not asleep yet so she’ll take that as a good sign.

“And one day on Venus takes more than a year.”

“I think I’ve experienced that on Earth,” Lena quips, and Kara laughs, thinking _Lena’s so funny!_ And then _Shut up!_

She can’t.

“And then at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, there’s a supermassive black hole right at the tail of the Scorpio constellation.”

“Appropriate.”

Lena knows astrology, too? Perfect, perfect specimen.

“Well, it doesn’t just suck in light. It shoots matter out like a slingshot,” Kara gestures excitedly with her hands.

“Tell me more about these shooting, sucking black holes,” Lena murmurs over the top of her drink. How did she manage to make even singularities sound suggestive? The bob of her throat as she swallows nearly makes Kara lose her train of thought.

Nearly.

“Well, first off, you can only find them by looking for everything moving around them,” Kara begins.

She reaches for her still full beer and Lena’s almost empty glass. She draws a bowl of nuts over from the seat next to them.

“Because they don’t reflect or emit light, they can only be observed by how they affect the surrounding systems,” Kara moves the items in a circular motion around a blank surface of the bar. “It’s fascinating, really. They use the same concept in enemy search and destroy missions. They have to catalogue and watch all the little pieces and indicators to find something invisible.”

“Gravity,” Lena supplies.

Kara smiles, eyes accidentally dipping down again.

“Yeah,” she answers. _Gravity_. “People aren’t so different than celestial mechanics. It’s comforting.”

That’s what Kara liked best about her major, anyway. Everything really did seem intertwined in an elegant design. In the concept of quantum entanglement, atoms were tied together, mirroring each other, even if they were light-years apart.

“That’s poetic, I like it.”

“What do you do?” Kara asks, still enchanted by the creature in front of her. “Other than the coffee shop, I mean.”

“Uh,” Lena picks at the sleeve of her jacket with a black nail. “Just the coffee shop for now.”

“What did you study?”

“Music,” Lena somewhat shyly informs her, pushing a loose strand from her pony tail behind her ear. “But I wasn’t the best pupil.”

Kara imagines Lena young, challenging her teachers and being too smart for class. She wishes she’d known her then, had met her sooner.

“Where did you go to school?” she asks, seeking more color for the vision.

Lena hesitates.

“Oh no, was it fancy?” Kara ribs. “Are you secretly rich?”

Lena bites her lip, reaching for her drink from Kara’s impromptu bar black hole.

“Don’t tell me you’re not a struggling musician because I liked that fantasy about you.”

“Fantasy?” Lena smiles again.

_Oh, boy._

“Next, you’ll be telling me about the trillions of neutrinos penetrating my body,” she drinks.

But even the prospect of penetration can’t derail Kara’s gasp.

“So, you’re a nerd, too!”

“I never said I wasn’t,” she says, her voice more husky than not, and Kara feels the words like an electric zip up her body, like a static shock.

She traces the lines of Lena’s hands; the long fingers loose around the whiskey glass, the square short cut of her nails, the absolute African plains of her palms. She engulfs that tiny drink. It’s a moon in her hand’s orbit, and it’s frankly sinful.

When Kara looks up, Lena’s watching Kara watch her. How many seconds constitutes as _too_ long to be staring at a woman’s hands?

“Oh wow,” the bartender suddenly interjects.

Lena breaks eye contact, her expression darkening slightly. Kara’s really starting to hate this guy.

“Oh no wonder,” he says again. “You’re Lena Luthor.”

 _Huh?_ Kara thinks while Lena’s hand squeezes into a fist around her drink.

“Mike,” he calls to a colleague.

 _NO!_ Kara screams internally. Did he switch bars? _He’s not supposed to be here._

_NONONONONO._

“Come over here, it’s Lena Luthor.”

A few curious onlookers turn from their spots at the bar, eyes glazing over Lena. She stands still as a statue.

“Oh hey Kara,” Mike approaches.

Kara’s not sure what she did to deserve this. Was she a murderer in a former life? A perpetrator of war crimes?

“Hi Mike,” she replies perfectly flat, not looking at him. In her periphery, she sees him lean across the counter to get closer, but Kara angles her head away.

Sure, she’d dated him off and on for a few confused months in junior year, but like an STD flare-up, she can’t quite get rid of him. She sees him around town, always obnoxious and hopeful, and now he’s here? With a look on his face like he’s about to ruin her date?

She glances at Lena, and she’s looking at Mike with something more akin to an arctic blast.

“Lena Luthor, huh?” Mike aims in her direction. “You were on TV, right? Shouldn’t you be in jail?”

What’s he talking about? Luthor? There’s a flicker of recognition, but Kara can’t quite remember.

“Come on, Kar,” Mike says with far too much familiarity for not even getting to second base. He tries to reach across the bar and poke her shoulder, but she slaps his hand away. “The deaths? The poisoned water? Environmental catastrophe in the name of capitalism?”

Wasn’t that years ago and all the way across the country in Metropolis?

“There’s a lot of people named Luthor,” Kara defends gallantly, but when she looks at Lena, her face is muted.

“I should go,” she announces curtly, putting down her empty glass with a clink. “Thanks for the drink.”

“No, wait, Lena—” Kara reaches for her, but she’s already slipped through the two people to their left, pushing away through the crowd.

Kara starts to follow before she hears Mike beckon her back,

“You gonna’ pay for those drinks or what?”

Kara whirls on him, furious.

“Thanks a lot, _Mike_.”

“You don’t want her, anyway,” he says with what _must_ be an attempt at charm. “Change your mind yet?”

“No.” Kara rips the bill off the bar. “You’re a jerk.”

Mike scowls.

“But I’m still tipping 20% because I’m a good person,” she mutters to herself.

* * *

Kara doesn’t hear back from Lena. She doesn’t respond to Kara’s texts, emojis or otherwise. It makes her feel uneasy, oddly ill, but she returns to the Sentient Bean on Tuesday, anyway, hoping a face to face encounter will clear the air.

But Lena’s not behind the counter when she walks in, friendly bell chiming above her head. Even though Kara had _just_ seen her arranging the dessert trays _(oh, eclairs!)_ through the front windows. Did she disappear into a vortex?

Instead, Sam waits with a patient smile from behind the register.

“Hi Sam,” Kara greets hesitantly. It occurs to her that it’s been nearly a year, and she can’t remember the last time Sam took her order.

It feels unnatural.

“Hi, Kara, what can I get you?” Sam asks in a tone that implies she’s feeling just as out of place.

“Uh,” Kara falters. “Just a vanilla latte, I guess.”

“Coming right up,” Sam chirps, and Kara observes her with a furrowed brow, a slight frown. Watching Sam make her drink is like getting a look into a darker timeline. She doesn’t like it.

When she passes the latte across the coffee bar, Kara stares at it like roadkill.

“Thanks,” she says, sounding nothing of the sort.

“So, what happened?” Sam leans across the counter, voice lowered.

“What do you mean?” Kara pouts, picking up her drink. She sniffs at it. It smells the same, but will it really be as good if Lena didn’t make it?

“I mean, why is Lena hiding in a cardboard coffee lid box in the back room?”

Kara can’t help but laugh (a little miserably.)

“Do you have an extra toe or something? A third nipple?”

“No!” Kara’s quick to answer. “Not that that’s bad or anything.”

In fact, that’d be pretty cool. Three nipples, three breasts on Lena— _focus!_

“Ex showed up,” Kara shakes her head.

“She?”

“He.”

“Oh,” Sam grimaces.

“Yeah,” Kara lingers. “Then he, uh, recognized her, I guess? So, did the other bartender. I didn’t know, but honestly, I still don’t? It feels like a violation of her privacy to google it.”

Sam makes a pitying face, a quick downward turn of her lips.

“It’s a touchy subject,” she quietly consoles. “I’m sorry, Kara.”

* * *

After that, Kara feels weird about going back to her favorite coffee shop. She doesn’t want to make Lena uncomfortable in her own place of work. It feels like harassment.

However, her options are limited. There’s the Starbucks by the highway where they spell her name ‘Clara.’ There’s the off brand shop in the campus cafeteria where the nineteen year old attendant asked her what an espresso was, and then there’s the coffee maker in the Engineering basement from 1967 that smells like frayed wires.

So, Kara gets desperate.

By the end of the week, she decides to try her hand at making her own coffee again. Maybe she didn’t try hard enough the first time. Maybe she’s an undiscovered coffee making savant. Maybe after a few internet tutorials, her genius will become untapped. However, when she finds herself standing in the aisle at the grocery store, the endeavor really starts to feel futile.

There are so many types of beans. And so many competing flavors and smells and countries of origin. Maybe she’d been a little hard on that nineteen year old. It’s clear she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an espresso bean and a coffee bean to save her life. Plus, it’s only just occurring to her that she doesn’t even own a grinder.

She gives up. She grabs a bag of ground beans at random, resigning herself to purchasing actual groceries while she’s here. The moldy cheese is gone, after all, and her apartment is littered with takeout boxes.

She meanders half-heartedly through the cereal and breakfast goods, picking up a discarded basket. She loads up on poptarts and oatmeal, telling herself it’s for morale. She’s had a hard week. Cocoa Puffs, too, sure.

Then, she roams the dried pasta section with daydreams of gorgeously gourmet angel hair and shrimp loaded plates. With sliced avocado and tomatoes. She’s fancy in this food-based fantasy. And that’s when she smiles, that’s when she looks up and down the aisle. That’s when she sees her.

Lena.

Lena materialized right out of her fantasy and into real life.

Lena pale in the fluorescent glare of the grocery store, blanched further by a white band t-shirt with a Def Leppard logo and a triangle that says ‘Hysteria Tour 1988.’ Lena with the black strap of her bra ( _so she wears those?)_ peeking out at her shoulder, hair in a hasty bun and held back by a patterned fabric headband. Lena scrutinizing a box of pasta like it’s wronged her in three languages, peering down at it unthinkably, improbably…. through glasses. Large, slightly rounded, and black rimmed glasses.

Kara almost drops her basket at the sight of her. She regards her stealthily, backing away towards the edge of the aisle, prey attempting not to alert a predator.

In a way, it’s reassuring to see Lena outside of the coffee shop (and in an outfit not intended to cripple her.) Lena looks like an actual person and not like an ocean siren or a Greek deity turned mortal. She’s still a punk rock dream, of course, but it’s less curated. The lines of her are drawn less sharp, smudged. Her eyelashes are not quite black, her eyes somehow greener.

Lena puts the box back onto the shelf, and Kara hastily rounds the corner.

She shouldn’t say anything, right? Lena didn’t want to talk to her.

 _It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,_ she tells herself as she goes through the rest of her shopping on autopilot.

Or it is fine until she rushes up to the last freshly made package of potstickers and finds her way blocked by another person taking hold of it at the same time.

“Lena!” Kara nearly shouts, and Lena’s mouth falls open in surprise. Kara can see the glint of her tongue piercing, then, and she has a desperate, fleeting desire to know what it tastes like. Is it cold?

“Hi Kara,” Lena greets, looking down at the package between them in consternation. She pulls it slightly, but Kara doesn’t give an inch.

“If you don’t mind,” she insists with a narrowing of her eyes.

“No,” Kara replies back, increasing her grip, fingers nearly puncturing the plastic.

She’s never cared this much about anything in a grocery store before, but she’s willing to die before she breaks the kinetic energy shared between them.

“This is the last one.”

“I know.”

“So…”

“So what? Give it to you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Not gonna’ happen.”

Lena scoffs and takes a step closer to Kara. Kara’s cheeks warm, and she’s forced to take a quick breath through her nose lest she roll over, belly up on the spot.

“I have plans for these potstickers.”

Kara’s brow crinkles.

“Plans with who?”

“No one,” Lena shrugs, but Kara can see the set line of her jaw. “But plans, nonetheless.”

Lena glances into Kara’s basket, then, looking for ammunition. Kara marks the moment when her eyes go dark, when she sees the forlorn bag of ground coffee.

“What is that?”

“Nothing.”

“Were you going to make yourself coffee?” she says, scandalized, dangerous.

“No!” then hurried and guilty, “You—you wouldn’t serve me!”

“I was—I was taking inventory,” Lena stammers a lie.

“Sam said you were hiding in a box.”

“Arias,” Lena hisses to herself.

Kara can only think to recommit to herself, to pull the potstickers again. Lena’s hand comes with her, stubbornly perseverant.

“Well, I’m not leaving here without these.”

“But I’d have to go all the way across town to get another,” Lena huffs with indignation, a now attractive pink blush to her cheeks.

Kara’s almost enjoying it. If she shifted her hand just so, their fingers would be touching. She could be hallucinating, but she’s convinced she can feel Lena’s angry puffs of air on her lips.

“Then, you’ll just have to eat them with me!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!” Kara yells back, although she’s not sure what she’s mad about. She’s gotten exactly what she wanted.

* * *

“Do you live close by?” Kara asks after they’ve bagged their items, when she notices Lena walking in the opposite direction of the parking lot.

Lena nods curtly.

“You don’t really have to make me dinner,” Kara relents, shifting one of the bags against her chest. Now that she’s cooled down, she’s feeling less than stellar about the way she reacted over a package of potstickers.

Alex wouldn’t be surprised though.

“I don’t want to mess up your plans.”

Lena shrugs again, but this time it’s more genuine, slightly exhausted.

“They’re not really plans. I was just going to get high and watch Fantasia.”

Kara chuckles, and Lena turns to look at her with a still sour expression.

“You seem pretty straight-laced,” she says in a manner that tells Kara she’s not yet done trying to pick a fight. “Is smoking pot too delinquent for you?”

“I work at a college campus, not a convent, Lena.”

Lena doesn’t smile.

“All astronomy students do is get high and talk about the Big Bang.”

Lena suppresses what is clearly amusement, but Kara takes it as a win anyway. They continue in relative silence for another few blocks until Lena turns to climb the stairwell of an older looking building. Kara follows while Lena pauses, fumbling with her keys.

“I didn’t know you felt so strongly about potstickers,” she mutters, fitting the key into the lock of what must be her apartment.

“They’re my first love.”

“I thought it was coffee,” she casts her gaze backwards. They’re close enough that Kara can tell she’s not wearing any make-up. She’s even prettier.

“Only recently,” Kara offers with a soft smile.

Lena stops, she doesn’t turn the key in the lock. Instead, she inclines her head towards Kara.

“Look, I’m sorry. About the other night,” she murmurs, but she looks soulful. Sincere and vulnerable. She leans her head against the door.

“It’s okay.”

“My family is…” she continues, briefly fluttering her eye lashes closed. “I don’t really want to talk about it, but if you don’t care, you can come in?”

Nothing could stop Kara from getting into Lena’s apartment now that she’s been invited.

“I don’t care,” Kara admits easily. “I just want to get to know you.”

Lena smiles, relieved, and opens the door. She takes Kara’s bag at the threshold and places them both on her kitchen counter, sorting through items while Kara looks around.

There are a _lot_ of books. Without any bookshelves. Piled high and on every surface. All shapes, colors, and sizes. Enough books to stock a small library.

“Is this where your… books live?” Kara teases, and Lena glances over her shoulder as she places a carton of milk in her fridge.

“I was a lonely kid,” she shrugs.

Kara takes the explanation at face value. She noses into the living room, breathing deep. There’s that same hint of vanilla. Nothing weird or moldy or rotting. It’s relatively neat. Only a few dishes in the sink, a jacket or sock strewn across the floor.

It’s nice.

“Coffee?” Lena asks, and Kara nearly mauls her. After a full week of coffee deprivation, she’s feral for quality caffeine.

“Please,” she practically whines. She hears Lena laugh lightly and then the melodious whir of an espresso machine running.

The fragrance of coffee fills the room, and it’s downright seductive. Kara didn’t quite realize how heavily she’d come to associate that smell with Lena. With her eyes almost closed, Kara drifts to the big windows across the room, one of which is unlatched and cracked open to a steel fire escape. Near to it, there’s a simple chess set with pieces arranged as if they’d been abandoned mid game. There’s an electric piano on the other wall, covered in dog eared music books. They’re dusty, though. Framed class rock records hand above them.

“My parents cut me off when I was young,” Lena says as if they’d been in the middle of conversation.

She comes to stand next to Kara, passing her an enticing cappuccino in a Star Wars mug. She’s discarded her glasses. Kara takes a sip of her drink, and it’s so good she wants to kiss Lena full on the mouth.

But that feeling is nothing new.

“I paid my way through school doing lessons and small gigs,” Lena continues, unaware of Kara’s intense focus on her lips. “I had a part time job on campus, too.”

“What kind?”

“Servicing the instruments,” Lena tells her with a small smirk. “Sometimes, I was helped the engineering department.”

Kara shakes her head, tsking.

“Nerd. I knew it. You’re good. You played me like a pool shark.”

Lena smiles, taking a drink of her own coffee. “It was cute to hear you rambling about space.”

Kara groans, looks at the ceiling, begs her body not to blush again.

_Cute._

“Anyway, science was more of a hobby,” Lena touches a finger to the edge of her cup. “I was getting fairly recognized as a pianist, there was a chance I could go professional when I graduated, but everything—with my family happened. I haven’t really played since.”

Kara nods, not wanting to pry and ruin their tentative truce. Lena watches her, contemplative, before leaning in closer and gazing into Kara’s cup.

“Is it too strong?”

“No,” Kara assures her. “Everything you make is perfect.”

“I had to ask,” Lena says with a wry twist of her lips. “You order a lot of mochas.”

“Hey!” Kara defends. “They have—espresso in them, I think.”

“And about fifty grams of sugar,” Lena laughs, and Kara rolls her eyes playfully, sucking down her coffee. Who cares if she’ll be awake until 1 AM.

As they’re standing there, a gust of wind brings a honey suckle sweet scent into the room, and she looks longingly at the fire escape.

“Do you want to sit out there?” Lena cues, and Kara nods excitedly. Lena turns and removes a pin that keeps the window locked in position, then she throws it open.

Kara is treated to a delicious view of her backside while she climbs through, balancing her coffee while she crawls out onto the platform. After snapping back to reality, Kara sets her cup on the mantle and follows. They settle thigh to thigh, hip to hip on the metal grating, and Kara shivers slightly. There’s a faded heat to the air that’s on the border of brisk. She looks over to find Lena sneaking a joint out from behind the window sill.

“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”

Lena smirks, winking at Kara who nearly perishes. She’s so unreasonably hot for this woman in front of her, even when she’s holding illicit contraband, she’s surprised Lena can’t feel it like the warm rays of the summer sun.

Lena produces a lighter from nowhere, it could be a close up magic trick for all Kara knows, and lights the joint. Her lips frame the brown rolling paper, saliva sticking and lips rosy pink as she sucks the bright orange ember to flame. When she’s done, she blows a thick plume of smoke into the air beside them and passes it to Kara.

Kara simply tries not to drop it into the street below like a goober, and sets it to her lips, pulling in smoke hard, telling herself not to overdo it, not to cough.

She coughs wildly, and Lena merely laughs, vibrant and musical out into the open night. Her eyes already look tinged with red, but Kara passes her back the joint, hoping that it’ll give her something to do while she recovers.

It works.

When the coughing abates, Kara’s throat feels oddly scratchy, too big and bloated. She tries to remember the last time she smoked. A few months ago? It had been awhile, but the same question always plagues her mind every time she gets high.

_Is this normal?_

She takes a look around. They’re back dropped by a navy marine twilight sky. There’s a cacophony of ambient street sounds drifting up from the commuter traffic below. She’s sitting on a stranger’s fire escape and said stranger is beautiful, gorgeous beside her.

_Definitely not normal._

Lena’s angled herself perpendicular to Kara, socked feet tucked under Kara’s thighs. She’s leaned back on her elbows, back almost flat to the grating, and drawing in another hit. She’s staring at Kara with lidded eyes and an unsettling intensity. She exhales, neck tipped back, and through her perfectly circular lips creates a series of beautiful, ephemeral smoke rings.

Kara watches them fade away on the light breeze.

She offers it back to Kara, but Kara shakes her head. Lena crushes the bright end of the joint to the metal banister and hides it back behind the sill.

Kara’s not sure how long they hold each other’s gazes then. Lena sits up, slips Kara’s glasses off her face. The motion feels like it takes a thousand years, a whole tide coming in and out.

“Your eyes are so pretty,” Lena says in a near whisper.

Lena’s are, too, Kara thinks. She can see them closer now. They’re a new growth lime green with yellow flakes in them like dappled sun through leaves.

She can smell her better, too, senses enhanced. There’s the rich coffee in all of its glory. Earthy and bitter chocolate, the burnt roasts, the fresh grounds, the sweet syrups, and steamed milks. Then, there’s a bright citrus, a vanilla, maybe her shampoo or moisturizer, hinted with a kind of deeper oil, like Moroccan. It’s musky, heavy, hidden-away. The kind of perfume that would stay on a shirt for weeks. Maybe that’s Lena herself.

“I didn't expect to like you,” she tells Kara, and it surprises her from her sensory meditation.

“Ouch,” Kara smiles, a reflex, though honestly she’s a little hurt. She drags her eyes away, slow as molasses over the surrounding buildings.

“You know what I mean,” Lena pinches her arm. She waits for Kara to look at her again, and she does.

“You put all these imaginary qualities on strangers, you know?” Lena continues, her voice a little raspier, a little sexier. “I make up so many lives for the people who come into the shop, but they usually disappoint me. Reality is like that.”

Kara knows what she means. She’s had her share of disappointments; in herself, in her family and friends, the greater world.

“But you've surprised me,” Lena finishes.

Kara’s not sure what emotion overtakes her then, what loose elasticity is plied from the joint that inspires her to push Lena back by her shoulders until she’s lying flat on the platform grating, what confidence allows her to sit straddling Lena’s legs.

Lena’s hands fall to Kara’s thighs almost absently, pillow soft. Kara leans over her, palms pressed on both sides of her head. Kara runs the pad of her thumb over Lena’s left ear, the cool metal of the six piercings there. She stares at her hair line.

“I have a really serious question,” she declares after a long moment.

Lena’s eyebrows waver, a thread of anxiety.

“Okay.”

“This has been bothering me for a long time.”

“Well, go ahead,” Lena swallows.

Kara waits. She leans closer, close enough that they’re sharing a breath, close enough she can clearly see the tiny, baby hairs on Lena’s cheeks.

“Do you dye your hair?”

“No!” Lena snorts suddenly, as if the question completely surprises her.

Kara grins, pulling back, and Lena tries to shove her off, but Kara fights to stay upright, giggling.

“Give me your arms,” she says, stealing one of Lena’s forearms.

Lena struggles to pull it back, but Kara holds fast. She flips it over, inspecting the fine hairs there. They’re blonde.

“You little liar.”

Lena doesn’t deny it, wiggling this way and that. Eventually, she commits a more focused effort and manages to flip them, holding Kara down by a pressed waist.

She looks at Kara’s own hair, picking through it with a finger.

“Do _you_? I see roots here.”

Kara jerks her head away, but it only serves to bring them closer, a centripetal force that can’t be denied. Lena’s hand wanders to the back of Kara’s neck, where it feels slow, deliberate. She cups it, possessing it firm. Her eyes waft down to Kara’s lips. She hovers, lips brushing supple over Kara’s.

From below, a male voice whistles loudly, cat calls drunk (but inaudibly to Kara’s ears.)

Lena lifts up, looks just beyond Kara’s shoulder.

“Cunt off, mother fucker!”

The guy curses back, keeps walking.

When Lena returns her attention, Kara can only laugh because it’s ridiculous, and they both dissolve into giggles. She can feel each of them convulse in her chest until she’s convinced her stomach is cramping.

“Sorry,” Lena says suddenly, sitting back on her heels and wiping at her tearing eyes. Kara lifts herself back up to stare at her. “I know we bought groceries to cook, hell, even argued over them, but do you just want to order Big Belly Burger?”

“Yes!” Kara exclaims loud enough to echo down the entire street.

“I think your eyes just fully dilated,” Lena laughs, dragging Kara back through the window by the wrist.

Kara shudders at the contact, trying to remember what they were even talking about when they stagger inside. She reclaims her mug of coffee and seats herself on Lena’s comfy couch, smells the cappuccino intently while Lena orders their food, losing her train of thought several times and repeating herself far too much.

Bless the order taker.

After, Lena seats herself next to Kara on the couch, dreamily staring at her.

“So, do you want to talk about the big bang?”

Kara giggles, pulling her face from her coffee.

“Hold on, wait,” Lena jumps up. “Let me just slip into something more comfortable.”

Kara’s entirely lost, has no idea where this is going, her entire body tensing at the implied innuendo. Then, Lena reaches theatrically under her shirt and whips off her bra off.

“There.”

Kara laughs harder, cupping a hand over her mouth.

“I’ve got Netflix. We can watch sex in the titty, I mean, tits in the city,” Lena continues to joke, and Kara’s sides are hurting.

“Tits okay,” she pats Kara lightly on the shoulder. “Tits not a big deal.”

Kara hides her face, dying.

“Oh my god, Lena, please stop,” she begs. She’s spilled her coffee on herself twice, and Kara reaches to put her cup down on the short table in front of them.

“She can’t get over tit,” Lena says, bouncing (in more places than one) back onto the couch cushions beside her. Kara watches the up and down motion, doesn’t look where she’s going, and fully misses the edge of the table with her cup. It all goes clattering to the floor.

Far from being mad, Lena only howls with laughter.

“You’re hopeless!”

“You’re—you’re mean! You do that on purpose!”

All in all, it’s par for the course for their relationship so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanted to pitch this into an electrical fire by the end, but let me know what you think! follow me on tumblr/twitter @hrwinter for more.


	9. the tit obsessed coffee shop AU ch 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who donated to the Minneapolis Bail Fund! It really changed my outlook on an otherwise bleak Friday morning in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. And apologies this took a bit to write. It’s been ROUGH to access any creativity. So, please let me know if you like it!

It’s been a long week, but Kara feels the tension bleed out of her at the possibility of seeing Lena. When she gets the text,

🍷 👩🏼🤝👩🏻 🎶❓

her reaction is visceral, like a cold plunge into water. She’s excited to see her.

On her walk over, it’s cloudy, a slate white providing a gentle bluntness to what would otherwise have been a warm summer’s day. Instead, it’s cool and slightly breezy. If Kara didn’t naturally run hot, she might’ve thrown on a light jacket. As it is, there’s a touch of humidity to the air, like it might rain, but she risks it, going without and dressing in a cute, blush pink scalloped knit sweater, hair in a messy bun.

There’s an art to looking like she didn’t try _that_ hard while getting ready, but if Kara’s shirt rides up on her broad shoulders in a fantasy where she’s reaching for something high on a top shelf, blessing Lena with an eyeful of what she knows are an envious set of ab muscles, it’ll be more of a wish fulfilled than a plan enacted. Kara’s lip gloss is thinly applied, too, and not the lipsmacker, flavored kind that Alex begged her not to wear (“You’ve had that shit since 8th grade.”) But what can Kara say? It tasted good. However, she’s willing to be an adult for one night.

“You look nice,” Lena tells her, opening her front door and leaning against it with the tilt of her head and a pleased, curling smile. Kara can smell her perfume, and her stomach knots with an anticipatory, overpowering desire to impress. “Were you coming from work?”

She shrugs with an easy acquiescence. Allowing that white lie is better than letting Lena know she’d changed five times.

“Come on,” Lena touches the sleeve of her sweater, pulling slightly. “I just opened the wine.”

Inside, Lena pads barefoot across her wood laminate flooring. Kara inhales, breathing in the apartment like a soothing balm. Citrus. Vanilla. A hint of a cleaning product like Lena may have wiped the counters down before she got there. When Kara runs her finger pad across the surface, it comes back clean, slightly moist.

“Is red okay?” Lena asks, hip leaned against the galley countertop and already tipping the bottle.

“Sure.”

“I can’t tell you more about it than that, I’m afraid,” Lena adds with a placating smile. “But it tastes good.”

While she pours a new glass, Kara drinks in the image of her. Her hair is down, docile for the time being. She’s dressed casually but still somehow weaponized in black jeans and another band t-shirt (this time it’s Nine Inch Nails.) Kara can tell she’s already imbibed, at least a little, by the plum purple stain on her bottom lip, the irresistible pink flush to her cheeks. Also, she’s not wearing a bra. The black material of her shirt mostly camouflages it, but Kara has a professionally trained eye by this point.

“I thought rich people were supposed to be snobs about wine,” she teases.

“I’m not rich, but I can be a snob,” Lena baits with a lifted eyebrow, passing Kara her glass. “Just not about wine.”

“What about then?”

“Let’s go outside first,” Lena takes her hand, and who is she to say no?

Kara follows Lena back through the open window and out onto the fire escape. She likes how it makes her feel, like she’s a teenager sneaking out of her parents’ house to see a crush and drink whiskey directly from a bottle. Except it’s better because this time the drinking is legal, and there’s no narc of a sister to catch her and blow up her phone with a hundred missed calls.

They settle themselves into nearly the same respective places as the first time they’d come out here, Kara’s back against the burnished brick wall, Lena inclined against the steel railing. Her feet are even tucked under Kara’s thighs again, like it’s something they’ve always done.

“Well, let’s see,” Lena starts, thoughtful, swirling her drink in the glass. It’s a move that betrays more familiarity with expensive wine than she’s leading Kara to believe. “Piano tuners have to account for flooring. If the flooring reverberates, like wood, it’ll change the tune. My step mother used to go nuclear over that.”

“What else?” Kara encourages.

Lena thinks.

“An upright piano is just a grand piano on its side. On a grand piano, the body and strings stretch out horizontally. For an upright, the strings and body stretch vertically.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Kara approves.

It’s very attractive when Lena talks pianos, she decides. She likes this secret boarding school, hidden flair to Lena’s punk rock veneer.

She takes a drink of her wine, the rich, flowery flavor hitting her tongue, and Lena incants closer.

“I know what you’re thinking… just as beautiful horizontal as vertical, right?” she winks.

It’s instantly flustering, and Kara’s pretty sure the resulting blush reaches all the way to the tips of her toes. Her stomach pitches like a boat in harbor, rising with the tide. She immediately imagines Lena in both positions, horizontal _and_ vertical, and she’s clearly played right into Lena’s hands, who laughs.

It’s not fair. She grasps for something to say.

“Isn’t the pinkie finger hard to use? Don’t musicians always say that?”

“I don’t know, I can do a lot with my pinkie finger,” Lena flaunts.

Poor choice. Bad move. Big mistake. Kara’s dying, simply put.

“Please play for me?” she begs in an attempt to distract. When Lena’s like this, she only gets worse, more concentrated and heavily diluted. She breathes flirtatiousness like a thick fog, sweet smelling and enticing. Kara needs a decoy.

It works.

“Oh god, on that old thing?” Lena’s focus slips, and she gestures towards the dust-covered electric piano on the other side of the wall. “I bought that _years_ ago, and even then it was cheap and secondhand.”

“Pleaaaaseeee,” Kara whines, not above using her world renowned pout for low hanging emotional manipulation.

“Kara,” Lena protests. “It’s going to sound terrible.”

“It’ll sound good to me.”

“I used to play on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument. That thing in there is an insult.”

Kara would love to blame the alcohol for the next sentence she utters, but it’s wine and she hasn’t even finished her glass. It’s more likely a culmination of three hundred and fifty-two days of being teased by Lena Luthor.

“Lena, you don’t need a two hundred thousand dollar piano to get into my pants. I’m a cheap date.”

Lena’s attention perks at that.

It’s been a few weeks since they’d shared their first Big Belly Burger dinner, long enough for the semester to end, long enough to trade texts every day, coordinate a few coffee dates, partake in one delectable make out against a bar bathroom wall. They’d been holding hands and giggling and sharing vulnerable facts (they’re both adopted, Lena’s never learned to swim), but they hadn’t gone farther than kissing, really. They hadn’t had the conversation about what they ‘were’ or where the boundaries of their physical relationship lie.

It’s not because she doesn’t want to, don’t get her wrong. Kara is quite literally ravenous for Lena, since the very first day she saw the glimmer of those earrings in the glancing light of The Sentient Bean. The ripple of black inked skin as Lena flexed her forearm while steaming the milk. Kara’s wanted to see _all_ of that, how far up the ink went, how far down, but… there’s something precious to getting to know Lena first. To seeing her shy and blushing, preteen excited over a new album, disgusted at the sight of Kara eating three street hot dogs back to back. Kara wants to see every facet of the prism that is Lena. The slip of coached Connecticut diction, the hyper fixation while she’s reading. She doesn’t feel rushed. There’s an ease, an inevitability. It feels like savoring the smell of a coffee before tasting it, luxuriating in the chocolatey, bitter aroma, eyes closed. It’s there to drink whenever she wants, but she doesn’t have to drink it immediately.

But there’s also nothing stopping her. And sometimes when Lena is smiling at Kara the way she is now, eyes intent and dark bottle green, she remembers that fact deep in her very soul.

“As tempting as that is,” Lena finally answers slowly. “I’m not playing.”

_That’s okay,_ Kara thinks. She likes a challenge. She’s prepared for this.

“Fine,” she sing songs with a shrug. “If you won’t play, then I will.”

“You’ll play?” Lena’s eyebrows dance up with intrigue. “You play piano?”

“Mhm. I might’ve—” Kara falters, embarrassed and drumming her fingers absently on her glass. “I might’ve learned something.”

“Alright, I’ll bite,” Lena licks at her lips subconsciously. “Lead the way.”

Kara scrabbles back through the window on her hands and knees, wine sloshing, droplets narrowly missing her carefully picked sweater. Lena follows from behind, and when Kara’s standing inside the living area, she extends a hand to her for balance. Lena ignores it, opts to use Kara’s shoulders instead, briefly pausing to simply enjoy their closeness, fingers squeezing and her expression something like relish. After, she meanders to the far wall, the one painted an accented oyster grey and covered in framed records. A metronome sits forgotten on a bookshelf nearby. She whips off the electric piano’s dusty cover with a flourish.

“Go ahead, maestro.”

Kara pretends like she’s done this before (she hasn’t.) She sets aside her wine and sits down, the leather of the foldable chair scrunching. She takes the measure of the piano like she’s seen a hundred of them, not perhaps three. She lifts her closed fist to her mouth, pretending to have a microphone.

“How’s everyone doing tonight?” she pretends to talk to an invisible audience. “It looks lonely out there, but you’ve all got such beautiful faces.”

Kara wiggles her eyebrows at Lena, and she laughs.

“Don’t be shy we’ve got the tip jar,” Kara taps the air next to the keyboard. Lena pretends to drop a bill into it. “Thank you, sweetie. Now let’s see what we’ve got going on here.”

Kara presses random buttons and presets. She strikes keys that sound like a xylophone, hits more buttons until she finds an 80s synth. She attempts to play haphazard rendition of the Ninja Turtles opening score, and Lena’s still laughing, the belly aching kind, but she waves her hand.

“On with it, stop stalling.”

Kara laughs in kind. She didn’t think she was being _that_ transparent.

“Fine, fine. This goes out to the lovers,” she says, placing down her invisible microphone.

The beginning of the song is not kind to her, but she perseveres, playing a very slow, very rudimentary version of Beethoven’s F _ü_ r Elise.

It’s one of the few songs she knows on the piano. Eliza had owned a standup in their home growing up, and she’d play if Alex and Kara had begged hard enough. Eliza didn’t have much of a repertoire outside of Beethoven and a weathered, dog eared Chopin book. Kara preferred the fun Chopin, but when she’d asked Eliza to give her a quick lesson, she’d thought Beethoven might impress Lena more.

_“It requires a bit of emotional interpretation,”_ Eliza had said, but Kara will be lucky to hit the next six right keys in a row.

Said luck only carries her through the intro and the first melody before she gets snared, struggling to remember. When she’s about to give up, Lena’s behind her, hands over hers.

“I’ve got you, darling,” she says.

Her hands shift under Kara’s, and she continues the chorus perfectly where Kara had clumsily left off. Her chin rests lightly on Kara’s shoulder, her cheek soft and brushing Kara’s as her face moves to watch the keys. It grants Kara an unparalleled view of her hands, and it’s transcendent.

Kara’s seen them wrapped around a number of things. Remotes. Wine glasses. Tiny little espresso cups. Once, an apple. Lena’s hands absorb beer bottles, cell phones, and pastries. She’s simply got the Jupiter of hands. With her short cropped nails and long fingers, the piano keys are no different, and Lena easily spreads eight notes, a full octave.

“Now, you’re just showing off,” Kara murmurs like it isn’t totally working.

Lena pauses in her playing, face whisper close. She eyes Kara playfully, and Kara has such a desperate desire to kiss her, to wipe that smug look off her face, but she doesn’t. Not yet.

“With those clawing hands,” Lena teases. “I was a bit worried you were going to give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Kara leans away to laugh, sudden and bright, more than a little worried she might snort, but she’s happy to share in making fun of herself.

“Here, sit down,” she edges off of the seat, gesturing for Lena to take her place. “Show me how it’s done.”

Rising to the challenge, Lena sits but not without a comment first.

“I see what you did here, by the way. I’m watching you,” she points at Kara with two fingers.

“I did—nothing,” Kara feigns innocence, picking up her wine and taking a drink to otherwise occupy her mouth. Her ‘liar’s smile,’ as Alex calls it, always gives her away.

Lena returns her attention to the piano, sighing as if it’s as an old foe. She tests a few of the keys, adjusting a knob that does who knows what. She actually plugs in some sort of pedal. When she’s done, she closes her eyes, straightens her back. What Kara sees next is a total transformation.

Lena moves her body differently. It’s fluid and loose. Her hands are swift. Her black eyelashes flutter open and closed, and she doesn’t require sheet music, hardly even looks down at the keys. She’s changed the song, too, and it still sounds vaguely Beethoven. Is it Moonlight Sonata? Kara’s not sure. There’s a quality to it that gives it a physical presence in the room, and it’s sad, haunted, and resigned. Maybe this is the emotional interpretation element Eliza had been trying to convey. Kara feels herself unfasten as the music coils around her, a ballerina box open and spinning.

And there’s another thing.

Kara’s not an expert, she’s only a layman, but she’s pretty sure the finesse of Lena’s movements, her absent, almost casual technical skill is… extremely hot. That the planets have aligned in her favor.

She can’t help herself. She polishes off her glass of wine, and like a doomed sailor entranced by the call of a siren, she moves closer, positioning herself behind Lena. At first, it’s just her hands dropped innocently onto Lena’s shoulders. Then, she rubs over them as they flex and flatten. She lays Lena’s long hair to the side, draping it over her back. It exposes the imperious tendons that run the length of her neck, the lovely square of her jaw. Kara noses first into the top of her head, then right behind her ear.

Lena pauses slightly (maybe it’s just part of the music?), and Kara opens her eyes to an eye full of her cleavage just… right there, galaxy round and sloping.

“Kara,” Lena warns in a breath. “You’re distracting me.”

But Kara barely hears, breathing in the base scent of her. It’s the kind of close she loves best, skin to skin. Her hands fall to Lena’s thighs for balance, and she mindlessly massages the muscle there. Lena’s breath hitches, but she picks back up the thread of the song.

“Is this okay?”

“Mhm.”

“You’re so sexy, Lena,” Kara emphasizes with another squeeze, another press of her lips, not quite a kiss but absolute contact.

“I really should’ve played sooner,” Lena husks in reply, neck tilted up and offered.

Kara’s hand drifts up and over her throat, possessive, feeling for the rabbit flutter of her pulse. She leans towards it and presses another kiss more firm, certain. Her other hand plays with the hem of Lena’s shirt.

“In fact, I’m rather partial to this position.”

Kara can hear the overly formal diction slip, but it’s ignored in favor of _positions_. _From behind_. She makes a noise at the thought, the kind of which she’s embarrassed to acknowledge. Lena hears it and stops playing abruptly. She turns in Kara’s arms, hand already slid into the burrow of her messy bun.

“Can I kiss you?” Kara thinks to ask, but it’s already swallowed in Lena’s lips.

It’s not their first kiss. Or second. But somehow it’s still been excruciating for Kara to muster the guts to initiate them. It doesn’t help that she near obsessively thinks about it, too, and now that it’s happening, she only wants more. Wants everything. She’s all feeling, reduced to the sensation of hands and lips and tongues. For Kara, it’s a constant state of free flow expression.

For Lena, she kisses with the same easy passion and savvy of her playing, with a delicate musician’s coordination. A tempo that’s tangible. It’s fuller, wetter, parching, and there’s a desperation to it that loses Kara completely. She’s gone, out in space.

Lena turns fully to her, still seated on the piano bench, and Kara pulls her up to standing. They’re chest to chest, stomach to stomach. Kara’s hands slide under her shirt and higher, temptingly close to the swell of her breasts, to a teasing expanse of baby soft skin. Then, Lena’s licking light at the seam of her lips before becoming insistent, and Kara feels the cold touch of her tongue piercing as it winds into her mouth, and it nearly unhinges her.

Instead, she focuses solely on moving them to the closest horizontal surface. She pulls Lena by the meat of her upper arms, and she follows thoughtlessly. Once they bump into the couch, Kara crowds her space until she sits, and when she does Kara unceremoniously plops herself on top, straddling Lena’s lap.

“Can I take your shirt off?” she heaves, having meant to at least control the over eagerness of her tone, but it bursts out, entirely unfiltered.

She blushes, and Lena smiles.

“Sorry.”

It’s always awkward in the beginning, at least for Kara. There’s always the precarious dance, the careful navigation of sleeping with someone new. Figuring out what they like, what they don’t like. What’s sensitive, what isn’t. Everyone is different, that much she knows, and Kara’s had good experiences and bad ones, but it’s rare that she’s like this, overexcited and thrumming. When she’s all shaky hands and lips, fed by a kind of caffeine high. It just feels _right_.

It’s a relief. But also she’s terrified to ruin it.

Lena watches her, concentrated, lips puffy and red.

“Do you want to stop? We can.”

Kara sits up slightly, palms flat on the back of the couch. She looks down, face to face with Lena’s breasts again. It’s ironic, really. Breasts had been a pivotal point in finally acknowledging her sexuality. She’d always thought, if you liked them, wanted to touch them, that it definitely meant you were gay. She’s definitely gay.

“No.”

“So, you want to do this?”

“Totally.”

“Just a bit of nerves?”

“A little,” Kara smiles shy, and Lena does, too, black hair fanned behind her like spilled ink.

“Let me help,” Lena reaches for Kara’s hands, guides them to rest over her chest. When she squeezes Kara’s hands, Kara squeezes her.

“I’ve thought about this,” Kara lets slip, growing bolder. She passes her thumbs over Lena’s nipples.

“Have you?” Lena hisses, her voice higher pitched. “You can take off my shirt.”

Lena releases her hands. She bites her lip in almost perfect tandem with Kara feeling her nipples harden. It’s sensory overload. Kara grasps eagerly at the hem of her shirt, shimmies it free. She chucks it behind her, and Lena reaches for Kara’s face again, compelling her into a kiss. Her tongue ring is cool, metallic in flavor. It’s going to end her.

“Beautiful,” Kara pulls back, savoring the view she’s fantasized about for months. Lena’s smattered with freckles, a constellation on an otherwise vast and blank white canvas. Kara allows her hands do the talking for her, stroking up and down Lena’s sides. “You’re so soft.”

She can see her sleeve tattoo fully now, too. There’s a peek of a big one on her back.

“What’s that one say?” Kara asks, only just catching the edge of a cursive script.

Lena smirks, looking up, lime green eyes amused. “Purity.”

Kara giggles at the thought, and this time unfortunately, it is a snort. She covers her mouth in embarrassment, but Lena doesn’t seem to harbor any qualms about it. Instead, she brings Kara closer, hands wound around her waist, reaching to take hold of her ass.

“It’s cute when you snort,” she punctuates the sentence with a squeeze.

Kara’s laugh abruptly cuts off, and Lena is kissing her again, one hand reaching up to fist in her hair. Kara rocks into her lap, already heavily regretting her choice of outfit. Her legs are as spread as her jeans allow. She should’ve worn a dress, but either way, Lena’s hands are caving inward from her thighs with purpose.

She’s wet.

“Is this okay?”

Kara nods, unable to speak, otherwise occupied. Her hands have found their way home to Lena’s breasts.

“Can I?” Lena reaches for the button of Kara’s jeans after briefly flirting under the edge.

“Yeah.”

Without hesitation, Lena pops it open and runs the zipper down. It makes Kara hot with anticipation, but nothing prepares her at all for Lena angling a hand inside, first over her underwear and then under. Kara moans unselfconscious.

“This is what I’ve thought about,” Lena’s taunt tickles her ear. “Are you going to be loud for me, Kara?”

In this moment, Kara realizes she may have bitten off more than she can chew. She’d just watched Lena finesse a concert worthy performance out of a secondhand, cheap electric keyboard and she was about to let those same long fingers play between her legs. With one hand in her pants and trailing kisses up Kara’s neck, Lena’s turned the tables on her once again.

She’s going to die, but it’ll be worth it.

Lena works exquisite strokes over her clit, her other arm still wrapped tight around Kara’s waist. While she can’t quite reach her entrance, she’s thoroughly acquainting herself with everything else, never losing her rhythm. It’s embarrassing how worked up Kara is in a matter of minutes. Her body is at Lena’s mercy, and her senses are pared down to only those that feel, to the purely carnal and erotic.

Lena pulls Kara’s panting mouth back down to hers, where Kara breathes moan after moan against her lips. When she comes, she expects to feel exhausted like she usually does, a vague sense of foreboding. The desire to plan a quick escape route. But she doesn’t. It’s gasoline on a fire, and she’s not nearly done.

When she catches her breath, she drags her mouth lower to kiss Lena’s nipples, devotes herself entirely to them like a newfound religion. She spends enough time there that Lena is moaning, too, her own hand stirring to life again in Kara’s jeans, but that simply won’t do.

“Can I take these off?” Kara indicates Lena’s pants.

“Please.”

She unfastens Lena’s jeans with a surprising amount of aplomb for someone who’s just come with their clothes still on. But rather than returning to her seat on Lena’s lap, she drops to her knees on the floor in front of the couch, pulls the leggings free from Lena’s feet. She runs her hands up her calves, anchoring herself to Lena’s knees, and looks up. It’s just Lena naked except for her black underwear, and she’s blushed and red all over.

She’s absolutely gorgeous.

Kara wishes she was a little drunker, a little less inhibited, but as it is she drags a nail down the contour of one thigh, and Lena jumps, sensitive. She drops her face lower and migrates from stomach to hip to inner thigh, all while placing wet, sloppy kisses at the junctures in between. When she’s ready, she remembers the only sex advice Alex could ever bear to give her (“Fake it ‘til you make it”) and pulls aside Lena’s underwear with far more confidence than she feels.

She looks up first, gauging Lena for a reaction. Her mouth has fallen open with a tantalizing, silver flash of her tongue ring, and it gives Kara the courage to lick a single, broad stripe. Lena’s whole body seizes, so Kara does it again, and this time she moans.

Lena tastes good on the flat of her tongue. She smells even better. Kara’s only done this a few times, but good lord if she hasn’t watched enough lesbian porn to absorb the full knowledge of it purely through osmosis. So, she positions Lena’s calves over her shoulders, holds Lena directly against her face with two arms wrapped around her legs. Lena grinds her hips, her wrists locking together over her head, until they bend at the elbow, falling behind the couch. Her breasts have never looked better as her chest heaves, as her gaze lingers on Kara every few seconds to watch her work.

It doesn’t take long. Kara’s not sure who’s louder, in fact, when Lena comes. Can she sing, too? Head between her legs, it’s not what Kara was expecting to be thinking, but she suddenly wants to know. Maybe they could form a band.

She looks up to find Lena staring down at her with blown out eyes, breathing fast.

“You’re,” she stops, licks her lips, regains control of her breathing, “good at that.”

It thrills Kara. She brims with pride, and her fidgety fingers pick up their pace, rubbing circles at the soft place just inside of Lena’s leg.

“You know, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I invited you over,” Lena adds in a huff, running a hand through her own hair, looking absolutely debauched.

“Oh, no?” Kara asks with a touch of insecurity, fingers pausing, worried she may have misinterpreted the mood.

“I was supposed to be in between _your_ legs,” Lena says, and Kara laughs with a breath of relief.

“You played for me,” she tells her. “You get rewarded, those are the rules.”

“They are?” Lena arches an eyebrow. “You played for me, too. No one’s ever done that before.”

Kara gapes. “No one’s ever played you on a song?”

“A _novice_ hasn’t played me a song,” Lena corrects.

“Really? I thought badly serenading someone with an instrument was like, the number one move.”

“So, it was a move?”

“No, I mean—” but Lena cuts her off, pulling Kara’s face up and into a definitive kiss. She makes a sound, sultry, before she draws back, pointing at her lap.

“Back up here.”

Kara jumps to comply, but Lena stops her with a hand.

“Jeans off first.”

Kara begins to strip her jeans off, and Lena curiously trails her fingers under the loose material of her sweater, over her abs.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asks.

Kara pauses, smile playful.

“Say it at the same time on the count of three?”

Lena nods.

“1, 2, 3—”

“—has anyone ever gone down on you with a tongue ring?—”

“—want to start a band?”

Lena bursts out laughing.


	10. drunk clubbing (forkers)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> part i prompt: Lena Luthor and Supergirl (in costume) go clubbing  
> part ii prompt: @stephan-209 asked: Hahahahah can you make a part2- the next day?, lena looking at photos of them surrounded by rainbows winning the contest? People talking about this? It would be hilarious

**part i.**

Kara lands in the middle of downtown National City, a busted engine cloud of smoke following after her. She’s pretty sure something on her is burning, so she rubs herself on the edge of a building like a cat to put it out. A smoking piece of plywood falls off.

She’s covered in ash and dust. She’s got Lena gathered close in her arms, and she checks anxiously over her body, palming her body indiscriminately. She frankly doesn’t care about propriety right now.

“Are you okay, Lena?” she hushes into her hair, the perfect column of her neck, pale skin smudged with an unidentifiable black oil.

Lena’s fingers are clutched tight around Kara’s shoulders. Her eyes look strange and unfocused. She smiles at Kara, a little goofy. It’s the kind of smile usually reserved for her eighth glass of red wine.

Weird.

“Fork!” Kara curses, pulling a feathery looking dart out of Lena’s back. She hadn’t seen that. Was it from the alien?

Lena snorts, even though Lena doesn’t snort.

“Fork is _not_ a word, Karaaaaa,” she drawls. Kara’s pretty sure it is. It’s an eating utensil. Lena reaches for the dart, “can I borrow your pen?”

Kara yanks it back.

Double shrimp fork.

Kara doesn’t have time to investigate further, she shoves the dart in her suit pocket. She’s about to take off, make her way to the DEO, when suddenly, there’s people all around them.

“Aw, yalls’ outfits are so cute!” a party-goer comments with a big, bright smile. “You look just like them!”

“I always thought Lena Luthor and Supergirl would be a cute couple,” another says, and they all nod in agreement, cooing.

_What?_

“What are they saying?” Lena says, too loud. “Me? And her?”

“Wait—hey!” Kara’s a little irked at the disbelief in her voice.

“Oh my god, it’s Halloween!” Lena shouts suddenly, and the small crowd cheers.

Kara only just notices the costumes. A Pikachu and Ash. The Orange is the New Black cast. The Flash and Batman holding hands. Huh? What Twilight Zone was this? Had she forgotten about Halloween?

Despite having the inherent immovability of a six ton Mack truck, the crowd tries to usher them both inside the club, all arms and drunken revelry.

“Come on! You’ll totally win the contest!”

“The contest? What—” Kara protests, but Lena is already reaching for some kind of proffered green drink glowing in a yard long cup.

Triple pitchforks.

“Supergirl, where are you?” J’onn asks over the comms plugged into her ear.

Kara looks up and groans, allowing herself to be corralled into the building.

“KryptoNIGHT Club,” Kara mutters as both her and Lena’s hands get stamped. Lena laughs wildly at a joke that is only mildly funny, meaning it’s not one of Kara’s expertly crafted puns.

“Lena’s been hit with a dart,” Kara grumbles. “Is it dangerous?”

“I think it’s only intended to disorient prey. Is she acting inebriated?”

Lena starts dancing in Kara’s arms. She plucks the sunglasses right off of someone’s face and puts them on her head.

“Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeen!” she screeches and the crowd cheers again.

“Yeah.”

“Well, stay there for now. It’s not safe to return.”

Kara sighs and continues to carry Lena bridal style into the club. They’re flanked on all sides by women sparing them focused and appreciative glances. Which shouldn’t be a surprise since there’s at least a hundred rainbows adorning the walls, banisters, and ceiling of the club.

“They’re so pretty,” Lena contemplates the disco lights flashing above them with far too much fascination.

“We need to get _you_ a water,” Kara murmurs, headed towards the bar.

“You’ve been carrying her all night,” one of the girls from the earlier group approaches Kara, offering her a beer before she can even order. “You must be strong.”

“Thanks,” Kara smiles, friendly. The girl reaches up to squeeze the muscle there.

“Oh wow,” she says. “I thought this would be padded.”

Lena suddenly turns her head from the ceiling and hisses at her. The girl scurries away.

Lena grabs Kara by both cheeks, stares deep into her eternal soul.

“You’re my pretty pony.”

Kara laughs out loud, and Lena laughs, too. Later, when they’re pulled onto stage for the contest, they win. Kara accepts a crafts store gold medal and hoists Lena higher, like a prize. The crowd cheers, and several photos flash.

 _Uh oh_ , Kara thinks.

“Luthor’s a bitch!” someone shouts from the mob.

“She is!” Lena shouts back with a point of her finger. “Drinks on me!”

The club erupts into deafening noise again, and, discreetly, Kara pings J’onn.

“I’m in the middle of something here,” he answers, and she hears the distinct noise of an alien getting punched.

“Cool, cool, cool,” Kara starts. “Maybe after that, you can uh-pretend to both me and Lena?”

“Okay,” he says with another punch, a grunt.

“And get it photographed?”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later.”

He grumbles and hangs up.

Meanwhile, Lena’s gotten friskier, flush with gratification from their costume contest victory. She’s squirming against Kara and nuzzling her face into her neck. She’s emitting some sort of weird purring noise. Kara unconsciously squeezes her ass (trying to renegotiate her hold, of course,) and Lena bites her ear lobe in response.

“Gosh!” Kara nearly shouts. “Time to go!”

She super speeds them out of the club, only belatedly hearing the cheer and realizing she blew her cover.

“Fork!”

**part ii.**

Lena’s never felt this hungover, and she’d once attended Mardi Gras after a six day conference stint in Las Vegas. Suffice to say, she’s pretty sure colon cancer patients feel better than she does, but she’s still at the office, ice pack pressed to her temple.

“Ms. Luthor?” Jess tentatively knocks.

Lena hears it reverberate in her skull, and she motions her hand in front of her as if it will beat back the sound waves.

“Not so loud.”

“Ms. Luthor,” Jess comically whispers, and Lena glares. “I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to check your email yet, but there is uh--a matter with PR for you to review. And a meeting at 11.”

Jess politely closes the door, and Lena just stares at the empty space she’d previously occupied.

Lena hasn’t had _time_ to check anything. She can’t remember a single thing from last night. She could’ve read the thirty-two volume, original print Encyclopedia Britannica for all she knows. Kara had texted this morning with far too many emojis that she’d dropped Lena off at her apartment after an ‘alien dart’ and an addendum that she was ‘ _safe and sound, nothing unusual whatsoever._ ’ Regardless, she found an ego waffle in her DVD player. If Lena had had more brain power, that plus the effusive, rambling explanation of Kara’s eighteen texts might’ve been a warning, but as it is, she’s completely ambushed by the article attachment she opens from PR.

## “SUPERGIRL AND LENA LUTHOR TAKE GAY CLUB BY STORM ON HALLOWEEN”

Lena audibly gasps out loud, despite the violent shock of pain it sends throughout her body.

A byline beneath it reads,  
 _“Government claims photos are impersonators, but eye witnesses not so sure”_

Lena analyzes the accompanying pictures like an FBI digital forensics agent. She’s ready to call it a hoax before she sees herself being bridal carried, the possessive grip on Kara’s bicep, the following nuzzling into the blonde’s neck like a god damn lion cub.

Lena squeezes her eyes shut in embarrassment, purest mortification. She briefly wishes for death. She’d argue it was fake if she hadn’t secretly, shamefully indulged in such a fantasy several hundred times a week.

She immediately snatches up her phone.

“Hi Lena!--” Kara greets brightly.

“KARA!”

“Fork,” she mutters over the line.


	11. the crow au

You’re not sure what you remember about home. If you try, it might be blue skies and warm summer rain that you played in for hours. It might be your mother washing the mud out of your clothes, frowning and asking if it was really necessary for you to roll that completely in the dirt. You told her you were just doing what the dog did.

You had a dog, right?

You’re not really sure.

Because the other memories you have are not blue and green and the dirt brown of your knobby childhood knees. They’re grey and orange and crispy charcoal black. The market you visited where your parents would sometimes have hushed meetings behind shaky hands, it’s rubble. The wind that used to blow the fragrance of fresh peaches and citrus, it’s ash. The home you had is gone.

You remember a voyage, long, dark, and ripe with a putrid accumulation of smells. You remember getting to see the water a few times, opal blue and ever shifting. It was beautiful. But the ship crashed or was attacked, you don’t know, and then it was back to the oranges of fire, the reds of blood, and the screams of your parents you’d never find.

You washed up on shore alone.

Although, not quite alone.

That’s when you first saw her. The crow. You’re sure of _that_. She’d been there, pecking at the sand near your arm, the same one still clutching the cheap large plastic debris. It had saved your life. You looked over the edge of it, coughing salt water into the surf, and you saw her.

It was weird. She’d surprised you. You’d never seen a bird so big and black, you thought, and she shuffled from foot to foot, nervous. Was she hungry? Was she scared?

You don’t get a chance to find out before a man with large hands is swatting her away. She cawed angrily, reluctant to go, but she did, maybe to a nearby tree. He shook your shoulders then and asked you who you were.

“Kara,” your voice came out in a croak, not yours.

“Kara,” he says again.

The crow cawed.

* * *

It’s years before you put the patchwork pieces of your life back together, that you find out what happened to you. That a warmongering company, LuthorCorp, helped exacerbate the tensions in your region then exploited and profited from them by selling both sides weapons. But that doesn’t become relevant for a long time. For now, you’re an immigrant, and an immigrant is not a very good thing in this new country.

It could be worse. There are other kids who are not as lucky as you. Somehow having never set foot here, you have dual citizenship. Your mother was American. So, despite the government calling your parents insurgents and traitors, they don’t try to deport you. Or keep you locked in a cage. Instead, they put you in foster care.

It’s hard. It’s toiling. It takes you a long while to learn the language. You’re shy to talk because of it.

And you’re pretty. At least, people keep telling you that you are. You’re not sure what you see when you look in the mirror. The kind, clever blue eyes of your mother. The hard line of your father’s brow when he’d reprimand you for sneaking too many cookies.

But your prettiness doesn’t feel like a good thing. The other children resent you for it. And it brings you a different kind of attention, a kind that has you cowering from your foster mom’s drunk boyfriend, a kind that has your crow swooping in and attempting to peck out his eyes. She almost manages it, but when he swings, taking hold of her, you jump into the fray, too. You would’ve killed him if your foster mother hadn’t intervened.

That’s right, your crow has followed you here, has followed you through it all. She’s in the tree outside of the window when your foster mother returns you to the group facility for being ‘cruel and violent.’

You didn’t do anything. At least, you didn’t do anything you wouldn’t do again, a hundred times over.

“We’re better off here, anyway,” you tell the crow sitting with you during lunch recess.

“Why do you talk to that thing?” a boy asks you nearby, trapping a soccer ball with his foot.

“She’s my friend.”

“Friends can’t be birds.”

 _Yes, they can_ , you think.

“She doesn’t understand you,” he feels the need to add, certain.

But she does. You know she does.

* * *

You’re adopted into a new home not long after that. It’s different than the others. They’re called ‘Danvers.’ Eliza and Jeremiah, your adoptive parents, they’re kind and intelligent. They encourage your natural abilities in science and math. You’re starting to get A’s for the first time in your life, and you’re less reluctant to speak in class.

You still feel like an impostor. It doesn’t seem like a reality that’s meant for you. You were meant for the bottom of the sea.

“You have a right to be here,” Eliza tells you, but that’s not how your new sister acts.

Your crow has somehow inferred the antagonism between you. One afternoon she swoops in to steal a large portion of Alex’s sandwich and drops it on your plate.

“Hey!” Alex shouts after her, but the crow merely glares at her with dark black eyes, wings ruffling on your side of the picnic table.

“You did that on purpose.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Alex looks between two of you, wary, parsing.

“How did you train it to do that, anyway?”

“…patience?” you improvise.

“You’re lying.”

The crow caws loudly, and Alex narrows her eyes.

“Whatever, I’m going inside.”

The crow watches her leave, and you soothe her ruffled feathers with a hand. The sheen of them always makes them seem oily, but they’re not at all. Her feathers are soft, and she preens a little under the touch. You gives her a nickel to play with. Maybe you’ll actually _try_ to train her.

So, you make her puzzles. She seems somewhat competent in checkers. You read to her. Her favorite stories are fairy tales. Her favorite foods are unsalted peanuts, boiled eggs, shell and all. She likes apples too (you painstakingly removes the seeds, they’re bad for birds.) You feed her from the window. She sleeps in the tree there and follows you to school and back every single day. She watches you organize quarters for a state collection, nipping slightly at the plastic casing.

“I already gave you Iowa,” you tell her.

She clicks her beak back at you. Sometimes, she’ll steal your keys. You think she just likes things that you like, but you’re not sure. Alex says you’re projecting. Alex says you make up things that aren’t there, but honestly, Alex is a little mean.

Once on a fishing trip, the crow used bread to catch a fish, laying it before you all on the thick wood pier planks.

“That bird is smart,” Eliza comments, watching her chase away a hawk that seems a little too interested in the fish.

You’re proud. She’s fearless.

“Their brains are bigger than ours proportionally,” you reply with enthusiasm. You look to Alex. “See.”

“Her brain is bigger than yours,” Alex mumbles over her empty fishing line, and the crow dives down to nip at her.

“Hey!” Alex swats without making contact. The crow flies away again. “That crow doesn’t like me, I swear. She knows me.”

“Of course she does.”

“It’s meaner to me.”

“She’s a she, not an it,” you correct her.

“It’s not normal.”

“It’s perfectly normal for a crow,” you bicker with Alex. “They don't forget a face. They hold a grudge.”

“You sound like the Discovery Channel.”

“Well, it’s true. Did you know that they also mourn the dead? That they don’t migrate, staying in one place for most of their life?”

“So, you’re saying we’ll never get rid of it? Great.”

“She,” you correct her again testily. “And they can live to be 15 years old. So, yeah, you’re stuck.”

Alex quiets, and you’re thrilled to have won the argument.

But deep down inside, you’re willing to admit it’s a little weird, she’s a little weird. Crows are supposed to be social, and you’ve never seen her with any other crow. She only talks to you. She only follows you.

It would be crazy to think she wasn’t quite a crow, but something else, something more. Wouldn’t it? But you kind of do. You don’t admit it to anyone, but you do.

* * *

Graduation from high school is close, only days away. You’ve arranged everything for college, although not without a hulking amount of help from Eliza. She organized all of your scholarship forms, your applications, your dozens of essays. She kept you on track with projects and midterms and extracurriculars (you’re the captain of the Geology club, who knew!) And it’s all materialized into your acceptance at National City University. It’s only a couple of hours from Midvale, and you can’t wait for August.

Sometimes it’s crazy to think you’re going to college. A blonde, blue eyed girl who washed up on the beach one day like a sand dollar? You would’ve never put your money on her.

But here you are, walking a beach not that far from the one you arrived on, a big slate blue sky in front of you, wind whipping your hair. You think about the future; the new city, the potluck roommate, eighteen hours of classes in biomedical engineering.

“You’ll come with me to college, right?” you say to the crow perched on your shoulder, bobbing with every step you take.

The crow softly caws and nuzzles its head on your shoulder. It’s a rare form of her affection. Otherwise, her eyes are focused on the little crabs skittering in and out of the waves.

“I couldn’t have done it without you, you know,” you reach to bring the crow to your hand, her pointed claws clinging gracefully to two of your fingers. She looks back at you expectant and listening, canting her head to the side every now and again.

“We’ve never really talked about it,” you say as if it’s typical to apologize for conversations you haven’t had with your crow. “But you’ve always been there. You protected me.”

The crow flaps her wings a little. Is it pride? Joy?

“Thank you.”

You’re not sure what overtakes you then, but you do something you’ve never done before. Despite the fact that you’ve seen her roll around in ant piles, you lean forward and plant a little kiss on her feathered head.

Immediately, you know something has changed, that something is different. There’s a shimmer in the air in front of you, prismatic in color, and the crow flies away from you, landing, staggering in the sand. You chase after, but a crisp gust of wind blows sand into your eyes and you wobble, falling. When you scramble to your feet again, blinking and rubbing the grit out of your eyes, you don’t see your crow, but a girl with eyes as green as spring leaves, with hair as black as crow.

“You’re her,” you say as she sits up, looking confused, one armed draped across her middle.

“Yes,” the girl answers simply, shaping the word as if unfamiliar.

“You’re naked,” you announce.

“Yes.”

You strip your light jacket off, suddenly rushing to cover her. You rub her shoulders and she looks at you in that same, too intelligent way.

It _is_ her.

You have no idea know what to say next. You just watched a bird transform into a human. It’s not real. You made it up. Maybe you passed out. You did eat a lot of cinnamon rolls right before this. You pinch yourself, but you don’t wake up. You’re still here on the windy beach, clutching a familiar creature in your arms.

In a panic, you fall back on the very first English you learned.

“I’m Kara,” you say. She sort of smiles as if that’s obvious. “What’s your name?”

She looks away, thinks hard. She has a strong jaw. Her skin is too white, like it’s never seen sun. Maybe not under the feathers? God, you think you’re going crazy.

“Lena.”

“Do you have parents, Lena?”

It’s a ridiculous question. She’s been with you for eleven years. But it’s a ridiculous situation.

“I—don’t remember. But I guess I do,” she says thoughtfully. Her voice has a raspy quality to it, not unlike her caw. “They probably think I’m dead.”

“What happened to you?”

She shakes her head again.

“I don’t remember,” then, “a curse, maybe. On my father. A woman came to our house that night. ‘A payment taken of your most prized possession’, she said. Something about an enemy loved.”

“A curse,” you repeat back. It makes sense. Even if nothing about this makes sense.

You shake your head, focusing on what’s important.

“Don’t worry,” you take her hand. Her palm is butter smooth. “Let’s go home.”


	12. kebabs and kasnian kara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Kara hears their laughter first. Her heart sinks even before she turns to see Lena and Linda pressed close to one another, strolling easily down the street. Kara wonders if this is how she and Lena looked, back when Lena still spoke to her.
> 
> awesome art batten did for this, too!

The night is not unlike any other. It’s not hot or cold. It’s not moonless or brightly lit. Lena’s even dressed in her usual all black, a tactic she’d been employing lately to intimidate in her daily merger and acquisitions meetings. (She’s not sorry to remind some of her board members of the angel of death, that kind of fear keeps them in their place.) But what is different about tonight is that she’s waiting outside of a kebab restaurant, a little hole in the wall in downtown National City, nearly indiscriminate within the backdrop of other brightly lit bars and shops, the grey monotone of the concrete city buildings. As far as she’s aware, it’s completely unknown. At least, it will have been until tonight. Lena can already see some photographers setting up across the street, slowly becoming bolder and making less of an effort to blend into the bustling Friday night crowd.

Lena taps her foot impatiently, unused to waiting in a line. She can’t remember the last time she did. All of her food is ordered and delivered. Or prepped and served. It’s the kind of thought Jess would make fun of her for.

 _“Truly the 1%!”_ she’d condemn, albeit jokingly. That 1% was paying her paycheck.

“Do I always have to wear this? I feel stupid,” the goofy alien to her left asks her, snapping her out of her reverie. Lena looks over to see her pointing at the Supersuit with a sweeping motion of her hand.

Honestly, Lena’s not the biggest fan of it either. Not anymore.

“Yes,” Lena sighs, casually looking over the menu pinned to the glass. As if there are more than four options that she hasn’t already pretended to read at least twenty-seven times.

“It’s itchy.”

“I bet it is.”

As dates go, it’s standard fare. She feeds ‘Kara’ deliciously grilled chicken and zucchini, laughs on cue as Kara scrunches her face, lifts her nose in disgust.

“I don’t eat _green_ things.”

Typical paparazzi fodder.

All in all, it’s not even half an hour, straightforward really in terms of accomplishing the goal. Painless by the time they’re walking amicably back to Lena’s apartment. A small crowd of photographers follow. Lena hopes her mascara isn’t too smudged, that her tight pony tail has stayed its course. ‘Kara’ wouldn’t know to tell her. After all, she tried to eat Lena’s lipstick the other day.

_“The label said ‘Red Velvet,’ and you put it on your mouth! I thought it was a snack!”_

Actually, it’s not a bad idea for a new product considering, and Lena thinks to tell her R&D department, but instead she nearly jumps out of her skin when ‘Kara’ grabs her hand.

“I saw this in several movies?” she whispers with concern, but Lena’s somewhat distracted by the fact that her hand is warm and reassuring in its grip. Her eyes are that same blue, that same sweetly hopeful—no, Lena stops herself.

(Also, why is every version of Kara so obsessed with rom coms? Lena’s had the _Friends_ opening credits song stuck in her head for weeks.)

“Is it wrong?”

“No, no,” Lena tries to get a handle of herself. Good god. “It’s a good idea.”

Despite that, she holds ‘Kara’s’ hand with all the enthusiasm of siblings being forced to hold hands after fighting in daycare.

It just makes her sad.

“I’m coming up, right?” Kara asks with excitement when they approach Lena’s monolith of an apartment building. “I haven’t inspected house seven yet. It has four windows!”

“Sure, El,” Lena relents with a smile. It’s what she’s come to call her. Linda is absolutely the most ridiculous name she’s ever heard. Kara’s alter ego is not a 52 year old woman complaining in a crochet class, and Lena wants to break the pinkie finger of whoever gave her the idea for that name.

So, El it is.

At this news, El emits some kind of otherworldly screech and hugs Lena hard enough that her joints crack.

“Maybe it will rain today!”

She’s such a dork.

When they go up, Lena lets her ride her private elevator a few times before she insists on stopping at the penthouse. El can fly for Christ’s sake, even if she doesn’t have total control of it, but she says she likes listening to the levers and pulleys.

 _“What a tiny room!”_ she’d exclaimed the first time they were in it.

She’s cute, what can Lena say, it’s hard to say no. El didn’t ask to be here, to be created. Lena’s working diligently to rectify that, but still, she does enjoy her company. She’ll probably miss her when she manages to integrate her back within Kara. She’ll miss—

Well, she won’t admit to missing Kara.

When they’re inside, El strips off her Supersuit without a shred of inhibition (Lena focuses hard on the inner thread of her hand bag. Is that honeycomb stitching?) and changes into an oversized MIT t-shirt and pajamas. After, she bounces onto Lena’s sectional and boots up the Xbox (a new purchase which serves precisely one function) while Lena situates herself at the kitchen island with her laptop and a glass (a bottle) of red wine.

“I can’t wait to see what Mrs. Hancock is doing today!”

Mrs. Hancock is an NPC.

Lena shakes her head with a humored smile and works her way through a seventy-five page contract. She listens to the quietly charming ambient sounds of the three dimensional city, of El’s little swoons at animated tea cups. Once, she glances up to find her staring soulfully and zoomed in on the stream running through the town square.

“This creature is so small! And shiny!” El indicates a fish.

Her Kara had never played video games, but El is obsessed. She loves them. Or more accurately, she loves wandering around the open world, talking to NPC’s multiple times and getting exactly nothing done. She’s spent fifty-five hours in game, and she hasn’t left the starting city.

It’s sort of adorable.

Lena becomes fully immersed in the contract, she’s not sure how much time passes, but when she looks up again El’s activity has petered off into little snores, her head lolled back. She’s drooling a bit at the corner of her mouth, and Lena’s not staring or anything, but it’s why she sees the movement on the balcony behind her. It’s why her gaze darkens.

Kara’s standing there, red and blue looking more purple when silhouetted in shadow. (Lena has seen quite enough of that outfit for one day.) Plus, she can tell from Kara’s stony demeanor that she’s angry. It gives Lena fluttery feelings of satisfaction.

Opting for the decidedly more petty, Lena stands and paces to the floor to ceiling glass, crossing her arms and making no move to invite her inside. She watches Kara’s eyes cut sharp to the sleeping El on Lena’s couch.

“You drool just like that, too, sweetheart,” Lena taunts, cavalier.

Kara lifts both blonde eyebrows and turns, fuming towards the handrail. Lena rolls her eyes, slides the door open as quietly as she can. She takes one step outside. It’s colder now, but she’ll die before she shows it. She wills her goosebumps to go back to hell.

Meanwhile, she waits for Kara to speak, but she fears she’ll be waiting for an eternity.

“Did you have something to say?” she finally clips, impatient. “I’m afraid I’m not available for a social call.”

“Yes I have something to say!” Kara whirls around, spinning on her heel. Her cheeks are a fire engine red, her jaw taut. She juts the heroic round of her chin into the space between them, but otherwise she’s silent.

“Well?”

“I don’t like this!”

Lena taps her fingers against her arm. It’s a tactic she uses commonly enough in the boardroom.

“We both agreed it might cause an uptick in anti-alien violence in National City if we had a public break up. We need to keep a united front between a Luthor and a Super.”

“I know that, Lena! But you took her to Istanbul Kebab House. I’d been begging you to go there with me!”

“She asked nicely.”

“Last week you dressed her in that unflattering dress you know I hate.”

“I actually bought it,” Lena feels the ugly need to flaunt, to distract from the dress comment. “I bought the kebab house. It seems like a quality business venture.”

“Lena!” Kara outbursts again, hand to her head. She looks exhausted beyond measure. “When are you going to forgive me?”

Lena takes a step closer.

“Never.”

Kara sags.

“You said you would never lie to me again, and you did. It’s as simple as that.”

“It’s not simple—”

“It is. There’s no need for dramatics.”

Her voice has taken on a kind of unstable quality, and Lena hates it. She hates hearing Lillian’s words mirrored in her own voice but weaker. More caring.

“You lied to me, too,” Kara jabs at El with a thumb.

“To cure cancer,” Lena hisses. “Is that what you were doing? Curing the cancer of the Luthor name by searching my vault?”

“I made a mistake.”

“You sure did.”

“I did it to protect you—”

“Don’t say another word,” Lena holds a finger between them. “I can’t do this again, Kara. I can’t listen to your empty promises and platitudes. We’re different people. We service different moral mainstays. We can’t change our instincts. We’re irreconcilable, just accept it.”

Kara takes a huge inhale, physically expands towards Lena.

“No.”

Lena shuts her eyes, squeezes tight, before turning to gesture to the cold night air.

“Good night.”

Kara crumples, recedes. She turns to the rail, drifts inhumanly from the ground, as graceful as morning fog rolling in over the ocean.

“I miss you,” she says, her face half in profile.

The fissure in Lena’s heart cracks. It shudders. And Kara flies away.

When Lena returns back inside, El is awake and watching, a kind of furrow to her brows that Lena knows intimately as Kara’s confusion.

“We don’t need to talk about it,” Lena breathes, moving past her, but El stands, the rumpled soft blanket falling from her shoulders, and follows Lena into her master bedroom.

Lena can’t quite keep the tense anger from bleeding into her hands as she chucks off her heels, rifles too aggressively through her dresser for something to sleep in. El leans against the door frame, blonde head still sleep ruffled.

“I would never forgive myself if I hurt you.”

“I know that,” Lena says quiet enough to be ignored, but El takes a few steps forward, slips a hand over the round of Lena’s shoulder. Lena turns, too sharp and hard.

“But you did—I mean she did. She hurts me.”

Normally, she’s kinder with El, manages the walls of her boundaries with more grace, but having these kinds of discussions with two of Kara in the same hour really isn’t her ideal night.

“She was afraid to lose you, and she did. She took the route where she had you longest. Can you blame her?”

El sort of smiles, then. It’s a trademark of her innocence, her hope, her cleaned slate of history. At times, she’s so Kara, and at others, she’s so not. She believes that everything will work out. She’s never lost her family, her world, her culture. She’s never lost anything. She has hope.

But that thought sort of goes to support El’s point, and Lena pushes it away.

“This isn’t the first time,” Lena pulls from El. She throws the randomly selected shirt on the bed and stares at it. El follows her again, and Lena can feel the warmth of her at her back.

“Can I hug you?”

Lena sighs, turns to her.

“Did you see that in movies, too?” she asks with a stilted, slightly teasing smile. It’s easier than facing her vulnerability.

El nods emphatically, somehow inches closer than she had been. She opens her arms, and Lena looks at them for the mouse trap that they are. She’s been careful with maintaining her distance. She’s been wary of establishing more than a friendly cadence between them. For one, she’s not sure when El might dissolve back into a purple mist. Does she really need another clone of Kara breaking her heart when she leaves?

But something has to give, and Lena finds herself burying her face into El’s neck and hair, hugging too tight around her midsection, too clingy. She doesn’t smell quite the same, but if she closes her eyes hard enough, she can’t tell.

She misses Kara, too.


	13. that's my wife!!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: this is actually an ask i saw somewhere else a while ago but: soulmate au where you are compelled to point and shout "that's my wife!!!" at your soulmate the moment you lay eyes on her

It’s Kara’s first science and tech convention as a journalist. Snapper has _finally_ let her stand on her own two feet, and she feels proudly official with her heavy, laminated name badge, her rainbow lanyard, and a pen tucked behind one ear. (She’d seen Clark do that once and thought it looked Very Professional and Serious for a reporter. Also, she keeps losing her pens.) Kara spends the morning grazing the exhibition hall, allowing it to take her in like a current, overwhelm her in a sea of scientific experts. Most of them are older, white-haired, but Kara gravitates towards the women, to their displays of groundbreaking tech. She talks animatedly with one woman for almost an hour about string theory and dark energy. She gets a quote! And a phone number... interesting!

Either way, it feels like four days jammed into one by the time they get to the keynote speaker in a huge auditorium at noon. The crowd is eager, shifting in their chairs, a symphony of excited voices. It’s the kind of space that’s designed to host thousands of people, where rock stars and comedians perform. Kara didn’t realize there was a rock star equivalent for science.

Until she does.

The lights dim, the crowd quiets, and a woman crosses the stage. A woman with gorgeous, sleek black hair. A woman with lime green eyes and pale white skin. A woman with an aristocratic neck, jawline for days, and thick dark eyebrows. She glances slightly in Kara’s direction, her lips painted in a deep red smirk.

The urge that overcomes Kara is powerful, primal. She can’t resist it in the same way she can’t resist gravity. She stands in the dead silence of the anticipating audience. She points.

“THAT’S MY WIFE!”

It echoes in the wide open room, and the woman on stage snaps to attention, eyes squinted into the glaring stage lights. Every head in the audience turns to look at Kara.

Oops.


	14. hair porn fic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: If you ever have the time: a fic devoted to Lena being obsessed with how perfect Kara’s hair is. Hair porn fic

**part i.**

There are blogs dedicated to Kara’s hair. YouTube streams. Tutorials. Twitter accounts. Endless instagram feeds of windswept flyaways, sunkissed highlights, and champagne curls.

But Lena’s willing to bet that Kara’s hair fan club hasn’t experienced the micro trauma of meeting Supergirl in person. Her hair is three dimensional in sight, touch, and smell. The latter, in particular, is ruinous. None of _them_ have been pressed up against her, Kara’s arms under their legs, their face tucked away into the warm sanctuary of her neck. They can’t grasp the kind of salon grade, downright devastating scent that flows out of that hair, soft as the caress of the clouds they fly through.

Lena’s not even sure how to describe it. Ultra-rich shea butter? Olive or avcoado oil? Plant essences? What ingredients even create that kind of depth, tone, and shine?

Lena is no stranger to hair. She can braid. She does glossy high ponytails, coiffed buns, cascading waves, and straight parts. Her hair routine is just as rigid as her work schedule. She’s intimately familiar with gels and oils and six part conditioning routines. She normally schedules blowouts at 6 am in the morning. Her bathroom pantry is color coded.

So, that’s where the questions come in. Having known her well for years, she wonders... when does Kara find the time? What shampoo and conditioners does she use? Does she super speed through her routine? Is her hair sun enhanced too? Can it be cut with normal scissors?

It eats away at her.

Maybe Lena cracks.

Kara’s sitting there on her couch one afternoon, polishing off her lunch, licking absently at a finger (the anguish Lena has to deal with.) Her hair is up in a ponytail, and Lena understands why. Her hair is the most Super thing about her alter ego, and it must be normalized, controlled, and tamped down.

But it’s when Kara reaches up to tighten it that her biceps flex, and a madness descends over Lena. At her angle near the water pitcher, she can see the back of Kara’s neck, the wisps at her temple, the hair on her arms glinting in the light from the window. The halo of blonde contrasted with the blue of her eyes is like a sunrise over the ocean.

It’s too much.

She finds herself behind Kara, the scissors from her desk drawer in her hand. She’s thinking (madly) that this is for science. She will discover the secrets of such perfection for general public well-being. It’s for the greater good, a better world--

“What’re you doing?” Kara turns, sees Lena hovering there like a murderer.

Lena goes for broke.

“Cutting a lock of your hair.”

Kara’s eyebrows pinch. “Why?”

“For science?”

**part ii.**

“What kind.... of science?” Kara asks, adorably puzzled.

Lena retracts the scissors, forces the hand to relax, unaffected and guileless, by her side. It’s not like she was going to cut her best friend’s hair without her consent, ha. Ha.

“Well,” Lena starts, blushing. “Has anyone studied your hair?”

Kara’s eyebrows knit, even more confused.

“Why? To what... end?”

“I mean, you never know what kind of special properties it could hold,” she states in a rush, bullshit mode on full tilt. “Your hair could be super. It could cure cancer, it could thread into an ultra powerful rope--”

“Like Tangled?”

“Sure,” Lena answers even though she has no idea what Tangled is. “Maybe it’s a super food.”

“A food? Someone wants to eat my hair?”

Oops, too far.

“We’re getting off track,” Lena holds up a hand before this discussion can go any further off the rails.

Kara regards her in the painful silence. Then, her best friend’s face breaks into an accommodating smile.

“Okay. You can have some. If you want.”

“I...” Lena pauses. “Want.”

“Here,” Kara turns her head away and leans forward, revealing the knuckled, knobby bones in her neck. “Go ahead.”

Lena doesn’t move for an uncertain moment. Then, she reaches forward quickly and snips. She gasps, holding it in her palm like she’s felled something of unspeakable beauty. Like she’s killed a Monarch butterfly or plucked a ghost orchid out of the jungle.

Kara gazes around and smiles at Lena with warm amusement.

“It’ll grow back, Lena.”

* * *

Despite her firm assertions to the contrary, it becomes quickly apparent that Kara’s hair possesses no extraordinary powers. Outside of carrying Kryptonian DNA, it’s just hair. Just gorgeous, golden, thick, soft hair.

When Lena shares as much with Kara, she merely replies,

“I told you there was nothing special about my hair,” all while it drifts behind her, completely angelic on an invisible wind Lena can’t even feel.

Lena sighs.

“I know.”

And then, the more awkward question.

“Do you... want it back?”

“What?”

“The sample.”

“My hair?”

Lena nods, and Kara smiles again, moving closer. God damn it, Lena can smell her hair again.

“No, you can keep it, er, or do whatever with it.”

* * *

Lena can’t bring herself to destroy it, and she’s too paranoid that it might fall into the wrong hands otherwise. After all, she’s learned _magic_ exists. She doesn’t want to be the reason Kara gets some sort of voodoo doll hex. So, she puts it in a locket and carries it around her neck.

That’s totally not weird.

On the third week of wearing the locket, Kara says,

“I have x-ray vision, you know. I can see what’s in that locket.”

And that’s how Lena Luthor dies from mortication 25th October, 2019.


	15. milf cougar kara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: I have a silly prompt in case you wanna do smth with it: the gang meets cougar Kara from another universe. Just Kara but milfed up

The woman that comes out of the portal is Kara, certainly, but she’s holding a mimosa in one hand, a bedazzled pink phone in another, and is buzzed enough to stagger like a newborn fawn out of the portal.

It’s 11 AM.

“This isn’t the bathroom at the club,” she states in a crisp Midwest accent, smile so professionally whitened her teeth are bordering on luminescent.

“Uh,” Winn falters. “It’s obviously not her—“

“Who are you?” She saunters over, pulling on his tie flirtatiously.

Lena doesn’t quite know what she’s looking at for a second, mouth slightly agape. She shakes her head, resuming her task.

“Do you have—do you have super powers?” Lena asks, forcing Kara’s brilliant blue eyes to focus on her. Lena swallows.

Kara looks her up and down. Her smile widens, and she takes three steps closer.

“Only in the bedroom, babe.”

Lena nearly drops her clipboard. This is the 37th iteration of Kara that has come through the portal while they’ve been searching for Earth-38 Kara, and it is by far the most sexually brazen one. And just as painfully attractive as the thirty-six before her.

She’s older, in her early 40s Lena would guess. She’s a little too perfectly tan. Sun-kissed lotion tan with an absolute evenness only born from a tanning bed. Her biceps are less beefy, too, but no less toned, her overall body very defined. A yoga body. She’s wearing LuLu Lemon and some sort of advanced fitness tracker. Her highlights are flawless, silver hair mixed within and completely transfixing.

Oh God, this Kara is a cougar.

“You are gorgeous,” Kara enunciates every word. She’s so very close now, close enough that Lena can smell the champagne on her breath.

“We, um, we’re not looking for you.”

“That’s a shame,” she winks. Lena wants to die at the full body blush that elicits.

“You can, uh, go right back through that portal?” she indicates with a wobbly finger.

Kara appears to be overly preoccupied with the size of Lena’s hand before she shrugs and turns back towards the flashing purple light. She waves at Winn.

“Bye cutie! Namaste!”

After cougar Kara disappears through the portal, both Winn and Lena stare at the empty patch of wall behind it.

“Couldn’t she stay?”

Lena snorts.

“Why? Because it’s the only version of Kara that’s ever been interested in you?”

"Hey, shut up!”


	16. anesthesia au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kara and lena meet in the waiting room after being under anesthesia.

Kara's not sure if it's the recently waking up from anesthesia or if she really is witnessing the most gorgeous creature to ever grace this planet seated, cross-legged in the outpatient waiting room.

"Hi!" she finds herself sitting right next to the woman and practically shouting directly into her face.

 _Smooth, Danvers,_ she thinks. What can she say, she's always had game.

The woman stares back at Kara's suddenly very close proximity, doe eyed, irises round and the most tantalizing shade of sea foam green Kara's ever seen.

"Did you just—" Kara points inelegantly back at the door a nurse had just ushered her through, "have a surgery?"

The woman eyes her, a little wary, before replying.

"An endoscopy."

Kara gasps, reaching for the woman's hands (a little cold) and holding them in her overly warm ones. She rubs them together in an effort to bring heat into the stranger's fingers. The woman simply continues to stare, perplexed.

"Me too! Did yours go well? What are you in for?"

"You're very friendly," the woman states bluntly.

"Oh, sorry," Kara pulls her hands away. "I'm Kara."

"Lena," the woman says, still a little stiff but a small smile forming at the corner of her mouth.

Kara makes a conscientious effort to keep her hands in her lap like an overeager child as she waits for Lena to answer.

"And I have an ulcer, they think," Lena says, touching delicately at her stomach. "Too much coffee and working, not enough eating."

Kara winces. "Those are painful, right?"

Lena nods. "What about you?"

"I ate four mega sized bags of candy corn."

The face Lena pulls is one of total, abject disgust.

"Candy corn? Why?"

"It was a Halloween dare from my sister," Kara shrugs. "My stomach hasn't been the same since."

"I should think not."

Kara laughs at the woman's impeccable diction, like she could be one of those reading voice models. Or a librarian. A sexy librarian.

"Honestly right now I feel more woozy from the anesthesia."

"Me too," Lena agrees, staring down at her hands and flexing them open and closed. Such lovely hands. _Big_ , Kara thinks.

She's not sure how long they both stare down at Lena's hands, Kara's elbow bent on Lena's armrest, holding her chin in her palm, before she thinks to add,

"Can you believe they warned us not to gamble? Or buy a car? Isn't that crazy?”

"Completely."

"Although," Kara adds with an unnoticed slur to her words, her voice sing song pitching up and down. “If I could buy any car right now, I'd totally buy one of those sports cars with the butterfly doors."

"Like a McLaren?"

"Sure."

"My friend Bruce has one. I think I've seen it in his garage."

"Damn, is he rich?"

“I’m rich too,” Lena holds out her hands as if she's dropping invisible dollar bills all over the waiting room floor.

“But I'm boring," she says with a slump of her shoulders. "I always use a town car. My driver's name is George."

"George," Kara echoes. "Why do guys always get to be so flashy? You should get yourself a sports car for, like, female empowerment and stuff."

"You're right," Lena agrees with an unsteady nod of her head. "It's not fair. Let’s go buy one.”

Kara swoons closer, heavily encroaching over the boundary between their two respective chairs. The space between them is nearly nonexistent. The anesthesia side effects are definitely feeling more present.

“I think you’re my soulmate," Kara says, entirely uncensored.

Lena locks eyes with her for one boundless moment before she shakes her head hard, like a puppy trying to shake out wet fur.

"No, you wouldn't like me if you knew me. I am so scary," Lena tells Kara with such sincere earnestness, head bowed towards her. "Like so scary. I’m a CEO."

"That's cool!" Kara cheers, and before she can stop herself she's holding Lena's hands again. "And there's no way you're scary. You’re so nice and soft," she rubs Lena's fingers.

Kara's not quite sure what happens next. Lena sort of pulls at her hands, an unspoken invitation, and Kara's already halfway out of her seat, and it just makes… sense for her to fully get into Lena's lap.

The waiting room chair is perfectly sized for the both of them. Lena's hands anchor Kara, squeezing at her backside. It's heaven.

"You smell good," Lena comments dreamily, leaning forward to inhale at Kara's neck. Then suddenly she jumps back, jostling Kara in her lap.

"Oh my god, I’m gay!"

Kara stares at her, hypnotized by the river of small blue veins at Lena's temple and forehead.

"Oh," she starts. "Did you just… realize?"

"Yes—" Lena half shouts, then, "I mean no, I just had to tell you. So, be careful."

Kara laughs, wrapping her arms around Lena's neck. She massages her fingers into Lena's shoulders, and Lena sighs, reluctantly relaxing by degrees. Kara smiles, goofy.

"With what? Your feelings? Anyways, I’m bi."

"Oh." Lena mirrors Kara's words. "Are you single?"

"Give me your number," Kara replies in lieu of an answer.

They both scramble for their phones, Kara reaching into her back pocket and Lena fishing into an expensive looking hand bag. Kara sits backs on Lena's thighs and proceeds to ignore several texts from her sister. And what should be a simple swap of phone numbers becomes an impromptu photo shoot with lots of giggling and vaguely inappropriate touching.

"What is going on here?"

Kara pivots in Lena's lap, recognizing the voice of her sister coming from the open doorway.

"Alex?"

Lena's head has snapped to the door, too, eyes narrowed.

"Who are you?" she says with a squeeze of Kara's hips.

Alex's eyebrow raises, challenging.

"Who are _you_?"

Kara might actually hear Lena growl then.

"Lena?" another voice joins them.

Alex swivels to look at a woman just over her shoulder, tall and stately with legs for days. She has curly brown hair and soft, bedroom eyes.

"Who are you?" Kara finds her own voice grumbling.

"Sam!" Lena glows.

Who is Sam?!

Sam's eyes rove over the pair of them, and she raises a hand to her mouth to cover a smile. Kara reluctantly extricates herself from Lena's lap, standing but keeping hold of her hand.

"Um, Kar," Alex says, eyebrows threading closer and closer together by the second. "We have to go, so maybe let go of the stranger's hand."

"She's not a stranger, this is Lena!" Kara announces. "And I want her to come with us."

Sam snorts.

"What? No, Kara, we're going home," Alex takes a step into the room, and Lena squeezes Kara's hand possessively. "You need to get some sleep and recover."

"You, too, Lena," Sam intones, still lingering in the doorway.

"No!" Lena practically shouts, standing too. "I feel fine. We’re going to buy a car, actually."

Alex's jaw drops open.

"No, honey," Sam steps toward the pair of them then.

"Honey?" Kara asks, back bowing.

"Down girl," Sam quips in her direction. "We’re just friends."

"No, I’m your boss," Lena snaps at Sam, pointing, but it's as threatening as a five year old making demands about bathtime. "I tell you what to do."

Kara giggles.

"See, I’m mean," Lena gloats to Kara.

"No."

"Oh my god," Alex pinches the bridge of her nose. "This is a fucking mess, we're leaving. Now."

Kara stands taller at the warning nature of Alex's tone, and what follows is an absolute spectacle. It involves Alex chasing Kara around the room, Sam laughing loudly, and Lena threatening her and the entire hospital staff. It ends with Alex rough housing Kara inside of her Tahoe with threats of 'you owe me for life' and 'I can't fucking believe you." But Kara doesn't hear any of it, asleep by the time Alex gets into the driver's seat.

* * *

The next day, Kara wakes up late. There's a gloomy dark space where her memory of the day before should be, but she can't worry about that now. Instead, she groggily makes her way outside of her room, in search of the delicious coffee smell emanating from the kitchen. Alex stands there at her island, a sentinel, as if she's been up all night and waiting for this moment.

"How are we feeling today?" she asks neutrally.

"Terrible," Kara pours herself a cup of coffee.

"So…" her sister trails off, drumming her fingers, and Kara gets the distinct impression she's not going to like what comes out of her mouth next.

"Remember when you mounted Lena Luthor in the waiting room?"

Kara gapes at her.

"What? No, I didn’t. And who?"

"Lena Luthor," her sister repeats. "You were full on in her lap."

"You're lying," Kara splays herself over the couch. "I don't—remember anything. And Lena Luthor? The tech mogul?"

Alex ignores her.

"I had to take away your phone, and then you threw up in the shower. You don't remember that?"

"I was under anesthesia. I can't be held accountable for my actions," Kara shoves a pillow over her face, hoping it will block out the sound of her sister's voice.

"You're telling me you don't remember this woman?"

There's a slap of paper on her coffee table. Kara moves the pillow away, cracking open one eye to gaze down at the cover of a _Popular Mechanics_ magazine. It's graced by a woman with gorgeous black hair with eyes an endless emerald green. She looks familiar, but Kara's not going to let her sister pull her chain today.

"Stop messing with me, Alex, it's not funny."

Alex glares back at her. "You really don't remember."

Kara grumbles and places the pillow back over her face.

"Check your texts," Alex lobs Kara's phone, and it hits her square in the stomach.

"Ow!" she shouts, chucking the pillow at Alex who dodges it easily. She sips at her coffee smugly.

Kara unlocks her phone, eyebrows furrowing, and reads her last text.

"OH MY GOD!"

"When we came back to your apartment," Alex continues, enjoying herself too much. "You kept trying to make out with your fern plant. You kept calling it Lena."

"STOP!"

"You tried to eat a frozen pizza."

"SHUT UP!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> follow me on @hrwinter on tumblr/twitter for more shenanigans


	17. drunk lena

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompts: Lena placing a pair of glasses on a pillow and making out with it pretending it’s Kara 
> 
> would you consider writing drunk Lena again? I love your clubbing fic

Lena’s not always this drunk. Well. Lena hasn’t historically imbibed this much after the age of 26, but her mother’s been arrested and her best friend is a liar, so what else is there to do other than look for an answer at the bottom of a very large bottle of scotch.

She’s been to three upscale bars and restaurants with Andrea, both of them reverting to their messy boarding school days almost instantaneously after the third glass, giggling in the corner and overtly hitting on men and women by sending them pretentious $24 cocktails.

But there’s still a dark streak in all the buffoonery. Lena can’t stop searching for blue eyes on the face of every blonde or broad shoulders under the lapels of every Armani jacket. She hates herself for it. And she hates Kara Danvers. Or Kara Zor-El, whatever the fuck.

Lena is pissed.

She takes another moody sip of scotch while some stock broker continues to shoot his shot (why do they all talk the same? why do they all feel the need to explain how money works to her, a billionaire?) and Andrea’s laughing and laughing at a woman far too loudly, her finger tips sloshing the edge of a martini she absolutely doesn’t need. While the man goes on about blue chip stocks, earnings per share, dividends (kill her), Lena’s eyeing the restroom.

No one would miss her if she ducked out. She could have a car here in minutes. Hell, Andrea would probably appreciate the attention of both parties at the same time. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d finagled a twosome into a threesome.

But that means going home. It means gazing at the dark sky from the cold enclave of her penthouse balcony. It means seeing the downturned photo frame, glass smashed, but still not thrown away.

God damn Kara. She stays.

She doesn’t go home with the man, and Andrea doesn’t go home with the woman. They don’t all go home together. But she and Andrea do go to another bar, and after that, an after hours bar. Then, by some misfortune of a higher power, they end up at a bratwurst stand at 4 AM with a horde of college kids. College _children_.

“Someone threw up just there,” Lena points at the pavement.

“Oh, don’t be such a snob!” Andrea shrieks into the night, grasping at Lena’s elbow and toying with a necklace Lena knows to cost more than a tricked out Vespa. Lena may be glassy-eyed, there may even be two of Andrea, but she can still spot irony.

“I’m starving. And I haven’t had one of these in yeaaarrrsss,” Andrea elongates as they move up a few paces in line. “Remember when we’d sneak into town and grift old men for drinks? That hot dog stand just outside of Hawthorne’s? I’ve been desperate for one.”

Lena wants to complain more, but it does smell good. And by the time they have bratwursts fisted in hand and are leaning against a nearby brick wall with the rest of the infants, Lena’s not feeling all that bad. It might be the best thing she’s ever tasted in her life. God, this might be the best she’s ever felt in her life. Numb, blitzed out of her mind, somewhere closer to nineteen sheets to the wind than three, she’s no longer a Luthor, no longer a simpering fool to a Super’s lies, not a CEO or a disappointment or even a person. She’s just a presence existing on this curb, eating a bratwurst.

“I’m having an out of body experience,” she tells Andrea with half her mouth full and still swallowing.

“That good, huh?” Andrea has mustard on her chin.

“I want another.”

Lena glances up, and her visions tunnels. Her existence is whittled down even further, to its basest instinct. She’s become the singular pursuit of a thousand more calories, of another bratwurst. Lena surges into the street, the stand a beacon of light in the darkness.

But several things happen at once. There’s a screech of tires, the smash of metal, what feels like getting hit with a brick wall and then being shot out of a circus canon.

Lena finds herself throwing up on the pavement on the other side of the road, and Kara fucking Danvers yelling at a motorist. The guy has gotten out of his car, hood dented and engine smoking.

“You smashed my car!”

“You almost hit a woman! You could’ve killed her!”

“She just bolted into the street, that’s not my fault!”

“PEDESTRIANS HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY!” Kara shouts back.

“Hey!” Lena slurs, having regained her dignity by wiping her mouth clean of vomit. It’s called class.

Both the guy and Kara turn to look at her, but her eyes are trained on Kara.

“I don’t need your help,” she tells her with a point of her finger.

This feels very witty. The pinnacle of sass. So what if she’s lost a heel at some point and may have missed a bit of vomit in her hair. She’s the one in control.

The guy’s eyes narrow.

“Are you blind or something? Didn’t your mom teach you to look both ways before you walk into the street?”

At the mention of Lena’s mother, her eyes narrow, she sways dangerously.

“You’re fired.”

“What?” the guy rolls his eyes. “I don’t have time for this.” He whips out his cell phone. “You’ve got insurance right?”

“Um, yeah,” Kara hands him a card, but she’s quick to come to Lena’s side, to place a steadying hand on her shoulder. Lena tries to wiggle away from it like a petulant child.

“Stop it!”

Kara ignores her.

“Lena, I didn’t want to say it around him,” Kara cups a blocking hand over her mouth and points at the guy so he can’t see.

It’s so adorable and infuriating.

She stage whispers, “But you were jaywalking! And you could’ve been hit by a car. What’re you even doing out here?”

Lena rolls her eyes so hard, she might’ve just incurred permanent damage.

“I’m an adult, _Supergirl_ , and I don’t need an escort--”

Lena’s very mature tirade is interrupted by Andrea crossing the street, mouth still wide open and staring. The look she’s giving Kara is distinctly _not_ platonic, and the look she’s giving Lena is one of deepest intrigue. Her eyes scan the pair of them, their body language, the way Kara’s hand is still on Lena’s shoulder (hadn’t she shaken that off?), and smirks.

“Sorry, am I interrupting something?”

Lena could kill her.

“Be quiet, Drea!”

Andrea dissolves into snorts, and Kara glances between the two of them, a look of recognition passing over her face. Now Lena wants to hurl herself into traffic for real.

Kara opens her mouth to speak, but Lena waves a hand in front of her nose.

“Just--everyone shut up and take me home.”

And the route Lena wants to be taken home is clear when she swats at Kara’s (firm) bicep (to push her away, of course), and that swat accidentally turns into a posessive squeeze.

“Oh, can I come, too?” Andrea purrs, and Kara’s eyebrows furrow in confusion.

“No!” Lena barks at her.

“Fine, fine! Call me tomorrow!” Andrea waves, and like some sort of rich superpower, she’s already getting into the back of a sleek black car.

“Okay, Lena,” Kara hushes against her head. It’s too soft and caring, and Lena wants to push her away. But she doesn’t. (Mainly because standing is feeling like quite a complex task, and she doesn’t have the balance for it.)

“This’ll only take a second.” 

Then, Lena’s wrapped in a warm and solid embrace. It’s nice... before everything blurs, and she has the distinct desire to vomit again.

She never wants another bratwurst.

In the very next moment, she’s being gingerly placed on her balcony, and Lena’s surging out of Kara’s grasp and pressing her face against the cold glass of her balcony sliding door. It feels amazing, calming her stomach down by degrees.

“What’re you doing?”

“Oh,” Lena says. Maybe she’d been doing that for a bit too long.

She runs her hands over the glass in an attempt to open the door, heavily petting various keypads and biometric scanners. Nothing happens. She scratches at the glass like a raccoon desperate to be inside.

“Um, isn’t it over there?” Kara indicates a different keypad to the left.

“I don’t need your help!” Lena shouts before following her instructions exactly. The door opens. She grumbles inside.

Unaware and uncaring, Lena starts undressing in her living room the very moment she’s crossed the threshhold, discarding her shirt, her skirt this way and that. There’s a gasp behind her and another suspicious super speeding sound, but she ignores Kara. She paces into her bedroom to strip off her bra and grab an oversized shirt. After, she spread eagles on her bed.

“I, um, brought you a glass of water.”

Lena cracks an eye open, takes in the sight of Kara standing at her bedside, nervous and uncertain, glass of water extended between them like some sort of peace offering.

She groans loudly and sits up to snatch it from her, water sloshing onto her bare legs. She doesn’t register it, draining it dry, glaring at Kara over the edge of the glass the entire time.

The Super pulls at her fingers.

“What’re you doing here?” Lena rasps, rolling the empty glass onto her exquisite and overpriced comforter.

“You were in trouble, Lena.”

“You don’t care about me.”

“Yes, I do.”

Lena scoffs, completely undignified, a sound appropriate for an elementary school playground. She does it again because it feels good. Kara’s eyebrows pinch.

Lena swivels at the waist and plucks her reading glasses off her bedside table. She places them over one of her giant, California King-sized pillows.

“Oh, Kara, there you are!” she says, squeezing it’s sides together like she’s cupping its cheeks. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you in a pair of glasses!”

Kara’s brows furrow deeper, not amused.

“How did I not see that the kindness, the sincerity, the insistence that I was not just another Luthor was a total act!” she continues to talk to it.

“It wasn’t an act--”

Lena brings the pillow close in her arms.

“Stopping by to bring me lunch, complimentary puff pieces, spin class, game nights. You’re so sweeeeeet,” she elongates, squeezing the pillow tight. “And beautiful. You know what you deserve? A kiss.”

Surely, this bit has spiraled out of Lena’s control. This entire night has. And were she sober enough to realize it, she’d catch herself before this next part. But she’s not and she’s wasted. And this pillow is the Kara she used to know, the Kara Lena used to pine for unconditionally, fantasizing what it might be like to just, lean over and...

She loses her balance as she places a wet one just under the glasses of her pillowcase and falls over on top of it. Incidentally, it’s the perfect size for snuggling, just like Kara herself, and her eyes flutter closed, warm and content.

“I’ll--I’ll go,” she hears a voice say.

“Kara?” Lena mumbles, face down in her pillow and not long for this world.

“Yeah?”

“I lo--I mean, I hate you.”

Kara sighs.

“I love you too, Lena.”


	18. big kara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i forgot this one!
> 
> prompt: I like to think Kara's really *big*. Like between the height and the muscles and the bulk and the wavy film-ready hair she just takes up a lot of room in bed and Lena wants to be annoyed by it but just can't

Kara is a physical presence in more ways than one. Lena has always known this. It just becomes more apparent after they start dating.

For example, when Kara steps into her ludicrously expensive car for the first time and has the absolute audacity to duck her head away from the plush ceiling, Lena stares. Her toned, _large_ arms spill over the middle console. Her legs look tight, knees pressed together and thighs bulging in the foot well. Lena stares and for a moment wonders if she’s walked into some sort of fun house version of her $90,000 luxury SUV. Like a reverse Mary Poppins bag. Why does her girlfriend look like an NBA player stuck in an airline economy seat?

And Kara only adds insult to injury.

“Do we have to use your car?” she complains, working to fit the seatbelt over her chest (Lena stares at that, too.) “It’s too small.”

Lena is aghast.

“Kara Zor-El, this is a _Range Rover_. It is not too small!”

But it is too small. And this becomes a kind of comedy of errors where Kara points out she’s too big for a space, and Lena insists that she’s not (despite what she can clearly see.) She’s becoming quite the broken record.

“This is a California King! It is not too small.”

“This is a mid century Eames chair! It is not too small.”

“This is a men’s extra large button down! It is not too small.”

“This is an airplane bathroom! It is not too small.”

Don’t ask her about that last one.

Kara’s even gotten stuck in one of those slide tubes while chasing Ruby around the playground.

(It was not too small. Although Lena really did think they were going to need heavy duty construction equipment to pry Kara out of it.)

Is she living in a world of delusion? Maybe. That’s still is up for debate, but Lena _will_ admit (privately) that Kara does always seem larger than life, a bit too big for everything. Whether it’s constantly walking into Lena while they’re on a two lane sidewalk or breathing hotly onto the back of her neck while they wait for lattes at Noonan’s (which has plenty of open space to stand, by the way), it always feels like she’s taking up enough space for multiple people. Enough for say a middle school church choir, a dance troupe, or a junior chess club. Either way, she’s always touching Lena, cramped up to her side, warm and slightly sweaty. She’s also a Stage 5 clinger in Lena’s bed, and it feels like she’s sleeping with teenaged triplets and a labrador retriever, all in the awkward phase where everything is too long limbs. She’s had to push Kara’s blonde, runway model hair out of her mouth more than once when waking up.

And don’t get Lena started on when Kara’s putting down Big Bads. She looks ten times her size on television. She could be fighting Godzilla, and she’d still exist in the breadth and width of a Mesozoic Era Stegosaurus.

It should be too much. It should be a deal breaker.

But it’s not.

That night, Kara’s culling through Lena’s top of the line, stainless steel refrigerator just before bed, exacting her nightly raid on that day’s groceries. She picks around aimlessly, not finding exactly what she wants despite it holding both the quantity and variety to feed a small grade militia.

“Can’t you get a new fridge?“ she says over her shoulder, and Lena nearly rolls her eyes, knowing what’s coming next.

“This one’s too small.”

“Fine,” Lena answers with a huff, gazing skeptically at Kara through the black framed glasses that sit perched at the end of her nose. And Kara merely beams at her.


End file.
